Understanding urban mobility structures holds great value from both localized and wider perspectives. This knowledge can assist cities in understanding economic growth trends as well as creating effective traffic management strategies.

Urban mobility structure discovery through knowledge graph analysis shows that during weekdays, residents in Category 1 frequently engage in commuter travel activities and are concentrated along metro bus routes with high accessibility.

Transportation

Transportation – both private and public – is an essential element of urban mobility, impacting people’s ability to access their daily needs – work, school and family gatherings alike. Furthermore, its impacts are widespread – environmental protection measures being put in place as well as quality-of-life implications are important considerations when choosing how and where people travel.

Congestion leads to traffic accidents that require law enforcement resources for investigations and contributes to air pollution that puts human health at risk. Effective urban mobility planning mitigates these negative effects by optimizing road capacity and decreasing vehicle numbers on the road.

Consideration should also be given to new mobility services, which may help satisfy latent mobility demand in cities where there is an absence of supply. Integration requires an adequate policy framework so as to avoid disruptions.

Personal Movements

Urban mobility impacts society in many ways, but perhaps most viscerally when it comes to people’s daily lives. Traffic jams, unhealthy smog levels and noise pollution are just a few examples of daily nuisances plaguing cities worldwide that reduce residents’ quality of life.

The advent of private automobile ownership during the second half of the 20th century led to significant shifts in urban consumption patterns, residential locations and the growth of suburban areas. Automobiles reduced friction distance but at the expense of public transit accessibility and an uneven distribution of activity across urban space.

To mitigate these negative impacts, new mobility concepts are emerging which seek to decrease personal travel reliance on cars. They use technologies that facilitate sharing and multimodality using car ownership; such as ride-hailing services offering Demand Responsive Transport services such as E-hailing. Such innovations have the potential to significantly decrease traffic congestion levels as well as improve health outcomes by limiting noise exposure, dust exposure and stress exposure among urban residents.

Touristic Movements

Tourists and visitors represent an essential component of urban mobility. Their trips and tours can be classified as urban mobility because they begin and end within urban settings or involve activities within cities (see definition of tour-based mode choice above).

While existing research has explored how COVID-19 might have altered tourists and visitors’ travel behavior, much of it was descriptive in nature and focused on understanding individual perceptions of changes. Understanding their modal shift behaviors is vital in designing responsive strategies to promote public transit recovery and sustainable tourism.

Studies on urban mobility have also highlighted the critical importance of social capital and connectivity to mobility. For instance, urban mobility in neighborhoods is positively correlated with economic connectedness–measured as Facebook friendships between lower- and higher-income individuals22–although this correlation weakens when controlling for household income. Furthermore, mobility is positively correlated with other neighborhood factors like schools/parks ratio and percentage of households with children.

Distribution Movements

Urban mobility refers to all trips whose starting and ending locations are within urban settings, or at least some part thereof. These movements may take place within one city (intraurban mobility) or between multiple cities (interurban mobility). They may take place either intraurbanly (within one city) or interurbanly (spanning multiple cities), regardless of whether these movements take place inside, outside or between cities – just so long as at least a portion takes place in an urban setting.

Accordingly, their mode split depends on cost, availability, technology and preference. Walking and public transit typically play a prominent role for these trips while the automobile remains an effective mode of transportation in suburban or rural environments.

Contrary to conventional methodologies such as Combo or GraphEncoder, our approach fully considers individual, scene and travel heterogeneity when analysing urban mobility structure. This ensures more reliable results from analysis while also including other socioeconomic factors that impact people’s lifestyle such as work status, age and health conditions.