Using mobile signaling data to exam urban park service radius in Shanghai: methods and limitations

Abstract

Containing positioning information, mobile signaling data provide inspiring potentials to examine citizens' mobility at a low cost and a large scale and can be used to investigate service radius of public facilities. A deeper understanding of urban park service radius is crucial for park planning and management. However, due to the lack of empirical evidence, existing indicators about park service radius are mixed across park planning guidelines and related studies. Utilizing mobile signaling data, this study proposes an approach to identify park users and the location of their home, and ultimately investigates the differences in user home-park distances for parks with different characteristics. Mobile signaling data analyzed in this study involve 22.3 million mobiles during a period of 24 h in the city of Shanghai. 51,686 users of the 46 sampling parks and location of their home were identified based on their mobile connections to park-related mobile base stations. Correlation and Dunnett T3 test analyses indicate that on average, parks with larger surface area and in denser areas attract further users. Large parks within the inner ring of Shanghai have the largest mean home-park distance. Within the inner ring, the 70th percentiles of home-park distance for parks with areas of less than 5 ha, 5–10 ha, 10–50 ha and over 50 ha are 6.0 km, 7.0 km, 6.8 km, and 10.5 km. These results provide direct implications to urban park planning and to establishing a detailed typology of urban parks involving more contextual factors, such as surrounding population density.