Topological indexes and community structure for urban mobility networks: Variations in a business day

Topological analysis and community detection in mobility complex networks have an essential role in many contexts, from economics to the environmental agenda. However, in many cases, the dynamic component of mobility data is not considered directly. In this paper, we study how topological indexes and community structure changes in a business day. For the analyzes, we use a mobility database with a high temporal resolution. Our case study is the city of São José dos Campos (Brazil)—the city is divided into 55 traffic zones. More than 20 thousand people were asked about their travels the day before the survey (Origin-Destination Survey). We generated a set of graphs, where each vertex represents a traffic zone, and the edges are weighted by the number of trips between them, restricted to a time window. We calculated topological properties, such as degree, clustering coefficient and diameter, and the network’s community structure. The results show spatially concise community structures related to geographical factors such as highways and the persistence of some communities for different timestamps. These analyses may support the definition and adjustment of public policies to improve urban mobility. For instance, the community structure of the network might be useful for defining inter-zone public transportation.

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Urban Mobility Demand Profiles: Time Series for Cars and Bike-Sharing Use as a Resource for Transport and Energy Modeling

Data ◽

10.3390/data4030108 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 4 (3) ◽

pp. 108 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Noussan ◽

Carioni ◽

Sanvito ◽

Colombo

Keyword(s):

Time Series ◽

Traffic Monitoring ◽

Transport Sector ◽

High Temporal Resolution ◽

Urban Mobility ◽

Time Step ◽

Transport Models ◽

Bike Sharing ◽

Urban Contexts ◽

The City

The transport sector is currently facing a significant transition, with strong drivers includingdecarbonization and digitalization trends, especially in urban passenger transport. The availability ofmonitoring data is at the basis of the development of optimization models supporting an enhancedurban mobility, with multiple benefits including lower pollutants and CO2 emissions, lower energyconsumption, better transport management and land space use. This paper presents two datasetsthat represent time series with a high temporal resolution (five-minute time step) both for vehiclesand bike sharing use in the city of Turin, located in Northern Italy. These high-resolution profileshave been obtained by the collection and elaboration of available online resources providing liveinformation on traffic monitoring and bike sharing docking stations. The data are provided for theentire year 2018, and they represent an interesting basis for the evaluation of seasonal and dailyvariability patterns in urban mobility. These data may be used for different applications, rangingfrom the chronological distribution of mobility demand, to the estimation of passenger transportflows for the development of transport models in urban contexts. Moreover, traffic profiles are at thebasis for the modeling of electric vehicles charging strategies and their interaction with the powergrid.

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Role of COVID-19 and motionless communication on expected trends of mobility: an evidence from Italian and Turin data

European Transport/Trasporti Europei ◽

10.48295/et.2021.83.6 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-14

Author(s):

Claudia Caballini

Keyword(s):

Travel Demand ◽

Research Question ◽

Urban Mobility ◽

Web Traffic ◽

Mobility Data ◽

Local Mobility ◽

The Everyday ◽

Research Goal ◽

The City

The 2020 pandemic has been changing for months the everyday mobility of part of the world: we concentrate on one of the first areas hit by COVID-19, soon after China. One of the main elements of change is the consolidation of teleworking, which further prompted motionless communications. The emergency-induced reduction of the systematic travel demand has been counterbalanced by the increased volume of web traffic. As a result, communications which formerly required commuting or travel missions have been regularly performed motionless during the lockdown. All this is known, also by experience. The novelty is that this paper quantifies this phenomenon, with a focus on the city of Turin, Italy, and makes hypotheses on the post-COVID. Local mobility data, so as trends before and during the lockdown are presented, thereafter compared. Implications for the “new normal” ahead are fully elaborated, to reply to a pre-existing research question on the role of motionless communications in the future urban mobility management. Eventually, the paper provides directions to advance and create a reference for further transport policies, within the general research goal to contribute to advance scientific knowledge in this new transportation study topic.

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Sustainable Public Transport Service Adapted for People with Disabilities and Reduced Mobility in the Municipality of León, Guanajuato, Mexico

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13137471 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (13) ◽

pp. 7471

Author(s):

Fabiola Colmenero-Fonseca ◽

Carlos Daigoro Fonce-Segura ◽

Alejandro Guzmán-Ramírez ◽

Mariana Flores-García

Keyword(s):

Public Transportation ◽

Social Practice ◽

Urban Transportation ◽

People With Disabilities ◽

Urban Mobility ◽

Transport Service ◽

Cultural Organization ◽

Reduced Mobility ◽

The City ◽

Public Transport Service

Urban mobility makes it possible to incorporate new perspectives that make it possible to question and problematize the way in which social links and relations between city dwellers are shaped. In this way, mobility constitutes an increasingly massive, recurrent, and complex social practice, strongly conditioned by the existing levels of inequality and particularly those that entail processes of social exclusion. In the present research, the efficiency of the modality of adapted public transportation for people with disabilities in the city of León, Guanajuato, Mexico, which came into operation in 2012, receiving the 2019 Building Equality Award from the International Center for the Promotion of Human Rights and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), is analyzed. The management, design, and implementation of Inclusive Urban Transportation (TÜI), demonstrated how the articulation of actors (public, private, and civil society) are of vital importance for the success of the project. In this sense, it is important to count on the permanent participation of focus groups that identify and understand the real needs of users with reduced mobility. The results achieved allow establishing an evaluation that contributes to detect and mitigate the conditions of vulnerability, risk, and segregation of people with disabilities.

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Understanding the Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Public Transportation Travel Patterns in the City of Lisbon

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13158342 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (15) ◽

pp. 8342

Author(s):

Joao T. Aparicio ◽

Elisabete Arsenio ◽

Rui Henriques

Keyword(s):

Public Transportation ◽

Statistical Significance ◽

Transportation Systems ◽

Urban Mobility ◽

Travel Patterns ◽

Mobility Patterns ◽

Traffic Demand ◽

Demand Distribution ◽

Transportation Modes ◽

The City

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is creating disruptive changes in urban mobility that may compromise the sustainability of the public transportation system. As a result, worldwide cities face the need to integrate data from different transportation modes to dynamically respond to changing conditions. This article combines statistical views with machine learning advances to comprehensively explore changing urban mobility dynamics within multimodal public transportation systems from user trip records. In particular, we retrieve discriminative traffic patterns with order-preserving coherence to model disruptions to demand expectations across geographies and show their utility to describe changing mobility dynamics with strict guarantees of statistical significance, interpretability and actionability. This methodology is applied to comprehensively trace the changes to the urban mobility patterns in the Lisbon city brought by the current COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, we consider passenger trip data gathered from the three major public transportation modes: subway, bus, and tramways. The gathered results comprehensively reveal novel travel patterns within the city, such as imbalanced demand distribution towards the city peripheries, going far beyond simplistic localized changes to the magnitude of traffic demand. This work offers a novel methodological contribution with a solid statistical ground for the spatiotemporal assessment of actionable mobility changes and provides essential insights for other cities and public transport operators facing mobility challenges alike.

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Visualizing the structure of urban mobility with bundling: A case study of the city of São Paulo

10.5753/courb.2020.12362 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Tallys Gustavo Martins ◽

Nelson Lago ◽

Higor Amario De Souza ◽

Eduardo Felipe Zambom Santana ◽

Alexandru Telea ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Sao Paulo ◽

Decision Making Process ◽

São Paulo ◽

Urban Mobility ◽

Mobility Patterns ◽

Public Managers ◽

Mobility Data ◽

The City ◽

Algorithm Scalability

Visualization of urban mobility data can facilitate the analysis and the decision-making process by public managers. However, mobility datasets tend to be very large and pose several challenges to the use of visualization, such as algorithm scalability and data occlusion. One approach to solve this problem is trail bundling, which groups motion trails that are spatially close in a simplified representation. This paper presents the results of adapting and using a recent bundling technique on a big dataset of urban mobility in São Paulo. The results show that bundling allows the visualization of various mobility patterns in the city.

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Selecting Freight Transportation Modes in Last-Mile Urban Distribution in Pamplona (Spain): An Option for Drone Delivery in Smart Cities

Energies ◽

10.3390/en14164748 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 14 (16) ◽

pp. 4748

Author(s):

Adrian Serrano-Hernandez ◽

Aitor Ballano ◽

Javier Faulin

Keyword(s):

Public Transportation ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Freight Transportation ◽

City Center ◽

Analytic Hierarchy ◽

Freight Logistics ◽

Transportation Modes ◽

Last Mile ◽

Urban Distribution ◽

The City

Urban distribution in medium-sized cities faces a major challenge, mainly when deliveries are difficult in the city center due to: an increase of e-commerce, weak public transportation system, and the promotion of urban sustainability plans. As a result, private cars, public transportation, and freight transportation compete for the same space. This paper analyses the current state for freight logistics in the city center of Pamplona (Spain) and proposes alternative transportation routes and transportation modes in the last-mile city center distribution according to different criteria evaluated by residents. An analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was developed. A number of alternatives have been assessed considering routes and transportation modes: the shortest route criterion and avoiding some city center area policies are combined with traditional van-based, bike, and aerial (drone) distribution protocols for delivering parcels and bar/restaurant supplies. These alternatives have been evaluated within a multicriteria framework in which economic, environmental, and social objectives are considered at the same time. The point in this multicriteria framework is that the criteria/alternative AHP weights and priorities have been set according to a survey deployed in the city of Pamplona (Navarre, Spain). The survey and AHP results show the preference for the use of drone or bike distribution in city center in order to reduce social and environmental issues.

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Sharing Lisboa: A Digital Social Market to Promote Sustainable and Energy Efficient Behaviours

Climate ◽

10.3390/cli9020034 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 9 (2) ◽

pp. 34

Author(s):

Catarina C. Rolim ◽

Patrícia Baptista

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

City Planning ◽

Local Level ◽

Urban Mobility ◽

Goods And Services ◽

New City ◽

Social Market ◽

The City ◽

Academic Year ◽

Change Mitigation

Several solutions and city planning policies have emerged to promote climate change and sustainable cities. The Sharing Cities program has the ambition of contributing to climate change mitigation by improving urban mobility, energy efficiency in buildings and reducing carbon emissions by successfully engaging citizens and fostering local-level innovation. A Digital Social Market (DSM), named Sharing Lisboa, was developed in Lisbon, Portugal, supported by an application (APP), enabling the exchange of goods and services bringing citizens together to support a common cause: three schools competing during one academic year (2018/2019) to win a final prize with the engagement of school community and surrounding community. Sharing Lisboa aimed to promote behaviour change and the adoption of energy-saving behaviours such as cycling and walking with the support of local businesses. Participants earned points that reverted to the cause (school) they supported. A total of 1260 users was registered in the APP, collecting more than 850,000 points through approximately 17,000 transactions. This paper explores how the DSM has the potential to become a new city service promoting its sustainable development. Furthermore, it is crucial for this concept to reach economic viability through a business model that is both profitable and useful for the city, businesses and citizens, since investment will be required for infrastructure and management of such a market.

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New Mobility Paradigm and Indigenous Construction of Places: Physical and Symbolic Mobility of Aymara Groups in the Urbanization Process, Chile

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13084382 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (8) ◽

pp. 4382

Author(s):

Gonzalo Salazar ◽

Paloma González

Keyword(s):

Latin American ◽

Methodological Approach ◽

Urban Mobility ◽

Structured Interviews ◽

Physical Movement ◽

Rural Municipality ◽

Political Implications ◽

Geographical Elements ◽

Construction Of Place ◽

The City

In the current global scenario, in which mobility has been strongly impacted, it is relevant to highlight certain mobility experiences of Indigenous Latin American peoples, in which new cultural and geographical elements justify revisiting this phenomenon. In this context, the mobility of the Aymara ethnic group offers an opportunity for such a second look. Although the subject has been approached from the perspectives of internal migration processes and physical movement, as in other Latin American cases, studies have omitted some important aspects for its analysis, such as the practices, meanings, and political implications associated with mobility. Based on the new mobility paradigm, this article seeks to strengthen the perspective on mobility by researching rural-urban mobility practices and their meaning regarding the experiences of Aymara people who migrated from the rural municipality of Putre to settle in the city of Arica from the 1950s. At the same time, it is shown that these Aymara mobility practices imply spatiotemporal dynamics that are key for the construction of place, and allow for a widening of base elements that should be considered in the new mobility paradigm. This research is based on five years of ethnography, including mobile accompaniment and semi-structured interviews. This methodological approach has allowed researchers to explore how elements related to physical and symbolic mobility have constantly constructed relational spaces within the Arica and Parinacota region over time. This shows that mobility does not only refer to physical movement, but to politics, emotions, culture, and memory as well. From these results, the article examines and discusses key elements related to physical and symbolic mobility, and their implications in political and intercultural terms.

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Effects of COVID-19 on Urban Population Flow in China

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health ◽

10.3390/ijerph18041617 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 18 (4) ◽

pp. 1617 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Xiaorong Jiang ◽

Wei Wei ◽

Shenglan Wang ◽

Tao Zhang ◽

Chengpeng Lu

Keyword(s):

Network Topology ◽

Traffic Control ◽

Urban Population ◽

Deep Understanding ◽

Clustering Coefficient ◽

Spatial Distance ◽

Structure Evolution ◽

Effective Distance ◽

Urban Hierarchy ◽

The City

The COVID-19 epidemic has become a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Thus, this sudden health incident has brought great risk and pressure to the city with dense population flow. A deep understanding of the migration characteristics and laws of the urban population in China will play a very positive role in the prevention and control of the epidemic situation. Based on Baidu location-based service (LBS) big data, using complex networks method and geographic visualization tools, this paper explores the spatial structure evolution of population flow network (PFN) in 368 cities of China under different traffic control situations. Effective distance models and linear regression models were established to analyze how the population flow across cities affects the spread of the epidemic. Our findings show that: (1) the scope of population flow is closely related to the administrative level of the city and the traffic control policies in various cities which adjust with the epidemic situation; The PFN mainly presents the hierarchical structure dominated by the urban hierarchy and the regional isolation structure adjacent to the geographical location.(2) through the analysis network topology structure of PFN, it is found that only the first stage has a large clustering coefficient and a relatively short average path length, which conforms to the characteristics of small world network. The epidemic situation has a great impact on the network topology in other stages, and the network structure tends to be centralized. (3) The overall migration scale of the whole country decreased by 36.85% compared with the same period of last year’s lunar calendar, and a further reduction of 78.52% in the nationwide traffic control stage after the festival. (4) Finally, based on the comparison of the effective distance and the spatial distance from the Wuhan to other destination cities, it is demonstrated that there is a higher correlation between the effective distance and the epidemic spread both in Hubei province and the whole country.

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Emergence and evolution of social networks through exploration of the Adjacent Possible space

Communications Physics ◽

10.1038/s42005-021-00527-1 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 4 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Enrico Ubaldi ◽

Raffaella Burioni ◽

Vittorio Loreto ◽

Francesca Tria

Keyword(s):

Social Networks ◽

Community Structure ◽

Social Interactions ◽

Clustering Coefficient ◽

Human Beings ◽

Broad Distribution ◽

Phone Calls ◽

Dynamical Features ◽

Twitter Users ◽

American Physical

AbstractThe interactions among human beings represent the backbone of our societies. How people establish new connections and allocate their social interactions among them can reveal a lot of our social organisation. We leverage on a recent mathematical formalisation of the Adjacent Possible space to propose a microscopic model accounting for the growth and dynamics of social networks. At the individual’s level, our model correctly reproduces the rate at which people acquire new acquaintances as well as how they allocate their interactions among existing edges. On the macroscopic side, the model reproduces the key topological and dynamical features of social networks: the broad distribution of degree and activities, the average clustering coefficient and the community structure. The theory is born out in three diverse real-world social networks: the network of mentions between Twitter users, the network of co-authorship of the American Physical Society journals, and a mobile-phone-calls network.

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