A preliminary study of mobility patterns in urban subway

Abstract

Understanding human mobility patterns is of great importance to traffic forecasting, urban planning, epidemic spread and many other socioeconomic dynamics covering spatiality and human travel. Based on the records of Beijing subway, we presented a preliminary study of human mobility patterns at urban scale, including return ratio and trip distance. Especially, both linear distance and actual route distance are considered. We found that for a single mode of transportation, the displacement distribution not only decays exponentially, but also has a peak, which represents the characteristics of travel radius (CTR). The CTR of actual route distance is significantly greater than that of linear distance, which indicates that quite of the passengers make detours relative to the linear path when traveling by subway.