Decoupling geographical constraints from human mobility

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to separate geographical influences from human mobility patterns, revealing a consistent power-law distribution and linking spatial settlement structures to mobility behaviors.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach using the pair distribution function to decouple geography from mobility, bridging distance-based and opportunity-based models.

Findings

Mobility follows a power law over five orders of magnitude when geography is decoupled.

Geographical features significantly influence the structure of human mobility.

The approach bridges existing models by incorporating spatial settlement patterns.

Abstract

Driven by access to large volumes of movement data, the study of human mobility has grown rapidly over the past decades. The field has shown that human mobility is scale-free, proposed models to generate scale-free moving distance distributions, and explained how the scale-free distribution arises. It has not, however, explicitly addressed how mobility is structured by geographical constraints. How mobility relates to the outlines of landmasses, lakes, and rivers; by the placement of buildings, roadways, and cities. Based on millions of moves, we show how separating the effect of geography from mobility choices, reveals a power law spanning five orders of magnitude. To do so, we incorporate geography via the `pair distribution function' that encapsulates the structure of locations on which mobility occurs. Showing how the spatial distribution of human settlements shapes human mobility, our approach bridges the gap between distance- and opportunity-based models of human mobility.