Structure Of Urban Mobility And Its Correlation To Regional Economic Status

Human mobility phenomenon is driven by thousands of urban residents who trading off individual demands,transportation cost and places of interests and then making trips to maximizing personal efficiency.With the traveling and gathering of residents,abundant social activities cluster in some urban regions,and diverse economic opportunities flow among regions,thereby affecting regional economic development.The topological structure of urban mobility network reflects people flow distribution in actual urban transportation network.And travel hubs not only play important role on supporting urban transportation,but also gathering social activities and economic opportunities.They then have effect on urban regions’ travel convenience and economic activeness.From a multi-dimensional perspective,we quantitatively analyze the complexity of urban mobility structure and its correlation to economic function based on method and metric of network science.In exploring the spatial structure of urban mobility,we use residents’ travel trajectory data rich in diversified transportation modes to construct a Transit-based Mobility Network(Tb MN)which reflect residents switching transportation between hubs and then traveling in cities.First,through analysis of the basic topological characteristics of Tb MN,we found that it is an economic small-world network with hierarchical features,low cost and high efficiency.To enhance understanding of this efficient structure,macroscopically we examine the modular segregation of Tb MN and found that the cross-community connections improves the efficiency of long-distance trips.Further microscopically based on nodes’ travel volume,transportation entropy and participant pattern among communities,we discover some integrated transportation hubs that is extremely important to maintain network connectivity.These hubs connect each other densely and then form a cohesive core structure which proves importantly associated to urban regions’ integration and high transferring efficiency.Moreover the core also has a strong connection to regional economic status.These findings enhance the understanding of the structural complexity and functional realization of urban mobility system.In exploring the relationship between structure of urban mobility and regional economic status,we construct a multilayer mobility network driven by diversified social activities(Activity-based Multilayer Mobility Network,Ab MMN)such as work and entertainment,aiming to compare the economic explanatory power of different residents’ activity structures.We introduce connectivity and diversity indices that quantify the importance of urban regions in the Ab MMN and indicate that they explain a quite large amount of variation in individual urban regions’ economic status(in terms of taxable income values).The results show that urban regions’ structural connectivity and diversity indices can provide useful information on economic status in each layer.In particular,the education-related travel activity layer can explain 81.9% of the regional economic status with only 14.7% data volume.Further,we propose a composite index that showing a stronger predictive ability of regional economic status,which up to 85.3%.These results suggest that Ab MMN offers new insights into understanding urban socio-economic system and even a kind of method to infer economic status economically and quickly.In this study,we reveal the structural complexity of urban mobility under the perspective of diversified transportation modes and further its strong relation to regional economic status under the perspective of diversified social activities.