Exploring The Characteristics Of Urban Taxi Travel Based On Trajectory Data

Taxi trajectory is one of the most commonly used GPS trajectory data.It records the detailed spatio-temporal pick-up and drop-down location of taxi passengers,conveying much information of the urban taxi travel behaviors.As an important part of urban public transportation and significant supplement to conventional means,understanding the characteristics of urban taxi travel,especially the relationship between taxi travel and the conventional public transportation services,is essential to the public transportation promotion.This paper focus on exploring the characteristics of urban taxi travel based on the taxi GPS trajectory.First,by extracting multi-level taxi docking points in different day and time periods,we are able to get a thorough comprehension of the purpose and law of taxi travel by comparing the distribution of docking points.Then,bus station data is introduced into this study to find the relationship between taxi travel and conventional public transportation.To be more specific,this paper first analyzed the distribution of the distance between taxi pick-up/drop-down points to its nearest bus station,and explored the relationship between the number of taxi passengers and the capacity of bus network service.The main work of this paper is showed as follows:(1)Extraction of multi-level taxi docking points.Taxi docking points are the hottest points in a certain area at which there are lots of passengers get on or get off taxi.By analyzing the distribution characteristics of the pick-up and drop-down points along streets,this paper proposed an algorithm to extract multi-level taxi docking points based on grids in both hot areas and ordinary areas.Experiments result showed that this method refines the scale of the taxi pick-up and drop-down hot spot observably,making it more convenient to understanding the law of taxi travel.(2)Analysis of taxi travel characteristics based on docking pointIn this section,taking the taxi docking points as the entry to study the characteristics of taxi travel.The docking points are extracted based on different date and time periods.Then the number and spatial distribution are compared to analyze the characteristics of taxi travel.Finally,we can understand the need for taxi travel in different places or time and use it as a guidance for taxi scheduling.(3)Analysis of taxi travel characteristics with the combination of bus stationBus stations are introduced into the study on characteristics of taxi travel.For each taxi travel record,the pick-up and drop-down points are matched to its nearest bus station through the analysis of spatial-contiguity.Then the distance between the pick-up/drop-down points to its nearest bus stations is calculated and counted.Besides,the relationship between the number of taxi passengers and the public transportation service capacity is analyzed to understand the reason of the taxi travel.Finally,we try to find the taxi hotspots from the perspective of bus station and the hotspot area where public transport service is not in place.