Relating land use and human intra-city mobility

TL;DR

This paper explores how land use data can predict intra-city human mobility patterns, demonstrating strong correlations between trip purposes and land use types, validated through survey data.

Contribution

It introduces a model linking land use to intra-city mobility patterns, providing a new approach to predict population movement from land use data.

Findings

Trip purposes are strongly correlated with land use types.

The model accurately predicts intra-city mobility patterns.

Validation confirms the model's effectiveness.

Abstract

Understanding human mobility patterns -- how people move in their everyday lives -- is an interdisciplinary research field. It is a question with roots back to the 19th century that has been dramatically revitalized with the recent increase in data availability. Models of human mobility often take the population distribution as a starting point. Another, sometimes more accurate, data source is land-use maps. In this paper, we discuss how the intra-city movement patterns, and consequently population distribution, can be predicted from such data sources. As a link between land use and mobility, we show that the purposes of people's trips are strongly correlated with the land use of the trip's origin and destination. We calibrate, validate and discuss our model using survey data.