A tale of many cities: universal patterns in human urban mobility

TL;DR

This study reveals universal patterns in human urban mobility across global cities using Foursquare data, highlighting the importance of rank-distance over physical distance and proposing a model that accurately captures these movement patterns.

Contribution

The paper uncovers a universal law of human mobility based on rank-distance and introduces a rank-based movement model validated across multiple cities.

Findings

Universal mobility law based on rank-distance

Model accurately predicts human movement patterns

Urban mobility influenced more by place distribution than physical distance

Abstract

The advent of geographic online social networks such as Foursquare, where users voluntarily signal their current location, opens the door to powerful studies on human movement. In particular the fine granularity of the location data, with GPS accuracy down to 10 meters, and the worldwide scale of Foursquare adoption are unprecedented. In this paper we study urban mobility patterns of people in several metropolitan cities around the globe by analyzing a large set of Foursquare users. Surprisingly, while there are variations in human movement in different cities, our analysis shows that those are predominantly due to different distributions of places across different urban environments. Moreover, a universal law for human mobility is identified, which isolates as a key component the rank-distance, factoring in the number of places between origin and destination, rather than pure physical distance, as considered in some previous works. Building on our findings, we also show how a rank-based movement model accurately captures real human movements in different cities. Our results shed new light on the driving factors of urban human mobility, with potential applications for urban planning, location-based advertisement and even social studies.