On impact of weather on human mobility in cities

Abstract

Although researchers have demonstrated that human mobility is constrained by space, time and social relations, one important factor, namely weather, has been often ignored in the literature. Not only influences what people wear everyday, weather also has a major impact on their mobility. In this paper, we conduct the first large-scale analysis of weather’s impact on human mobility in cities. Focusing on a number of major cities, we construct a human mobility dataset from the social network Instagram. We discover that in general nice weather (e.g., moderate temperature and high pressure) has a positive impact on human mobility. Through analyzing mobility at locations of different categories, we further discover that human mobility is less influenced by weather at certain categories such as residences than others including stores and entertainment places.