scholarly journals Who, Where, Why and When? Using Smart Card and Social Media Data to Understand Urban Mobility

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuanxuan Yang ◽  
Alison Heppenstall ◽  
Andy Turner ◽  
Alexis Comber

This study describes the integration and analysis of travel smart card data (SCD) with points of interest (POIs) from social media for a case study in Shenzhen, China. SCD ticket price with tap-in and tap-out times was used to identify different groups of travellers. The study examines the temporal variations in mobility, identifies different groups of users and characterises their trip purpose and identifies sub-groups of users with different travel patterns. Different groups were identified based on their travel times and trip costs. The trip purpose associated with different groups was evaluated by constructing zones around metro station locations and identifying the POIs in each zone. Each POI was allocated to one of six land use types, and each zone was allocated a set of land use weights based on the number of POI check-ins for the POIs in that zone. Trip purpose was then inferred from trip time linked to the land use at the origin and destination zones using a novel “land use change rate” measure. A cluster analysis was used to identify sub-groups of users based on individual temporal travel patterns, which were used to generate a novel “boarding time profile”. The results show how different groups of users can be identified and the differences in trip times and trip purpose quantified between and within groups. Limitations of the study are discussed and a number of areas for further work identified, including linking to socioeconomic data and a deeper consideration of the timestamps of POI check-ins to support the inference of dynamic and multiple land uses at one location. The methods and metrics developed by this research use social media POI data to semantically contextualise information derived from the SCD and to overcome the drawbacks and limitations of traditional travel survey data. They are novel and generalizable to other studies. They quantify spatiotemporal mobility patterns for different groups of travellers and infer how their purposes of their journeys change through the day. In so doing, they support a more nuanced and detailed view of who, where, when and why people use city spaces.

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 651 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jianxiao Liu ◽  
Wenzhong Shi ◽  
Pengfei Chen

Research has shown that the growing holiday travel demand in modern society has a significant influence on daily travel patterns. However, few studies have focused on the distinctness of travel patterns during a holiday season and as a specified case, travel behavior studies of the Chinese Spring Festival (CSF) at the city level are even rarer. This paper adopts a text-mining model (latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)) to explore the travel patterns and travel purposes during the CSF season in Shenzhen based on the metro smart card data (MSC) and the points of interest (POIs) data. The study aims to answer two questions—(1) how to use MSC and POIs inferring travel purpose at the metro station level without the socioeconomic backgrounds of the cardholders? (2) What are the overall inner-city mobility patterns and travel activities during the Spring Festival holiday-week? The results show that six features of the CSF travel behavior are found and nine (three broad categories) travel patterns and trip activities are inferred. The activities in which travelers engaged during the CSF season are mainly consumption-oriented events, visiting relatives and friends and traffic-oriented events. This study is beneficial to metro corporations (timetable management), business owners (promotion strategy), researchers (travelers’ social attribute inference) and decision-makers (examine public service).


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 344
Author(s):  
Yuqin Jiang ◽  
Xiao Huang ◽  
Zhenlong Li

The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has impacted every facet of society. One of the non-pharmacological measures to contain the COVID-19 infection is social distancing. Federal, state, and local governments have placed multiple executive orders for human mobility reduction to slow down the spread of COVID-19. This paper uses geotagged tweets data to reveal the spatiotemporal human mobility patterns during this COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. With New York City open data, human mobility pattern changes were detected by different categories of land use, including residential, parks, transportation facilities, and workplaces. This study further compares human mobility patterns by land use types based on an open social media platform (Twitter) and the human mobility patterns revealed by Google Community Mobility Report cell phone location, indicating that in some applications, open-access social media data can generate similar results to private data. The results of this study can be further used for human mobility analysis and the battle against COVID-19.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (10) ◽  
pp. 434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tong Zhang ◽  
Jianlong Wang ◽  
Chenrong Cui ◽  
Yicong Li ◽  
Wei He ◽  
...  

Understanding human movement patterns is of fundamental importance in transportation planning and management. We propose to examine complex public transit travel patterns over a large-scale transit network, which is challenging since it involves thousands of transit passengers and massive data from heterogeneous sources. Additionally, efficient representation and visualization of discovered travel patterns is difficult given a large number of transit trips. To address these challenges, this study leverages advanced machine learning methods to identify time-varying mobility patterns based on smart card data and other urban data. The proposed approach delivers a comprehensive solution to pre-process, analyze, and visualize complex public transit travel patterns. This approach first fuses smart card data with other urban data to reconstruct original transit trips. We use two machine learning methods, including a clustering algorithm to extract transit corridors to represent primary mobility connections between different regions and a graph-embedding algorithm to discover hierarchical mobility community structures. We also devise compact and effective multi-scale visualization forms to represent the discovered travel behavior dynamics. An interactive web-based mapping prototype is developed to integrate advanced machine learning methods with specific visualizations to characterize transit travel behavior patterns and to enable visual exploration of transit mobility patterns at different scales and resolutions over space and time. The proposed approach is evaluated using multi-source big transit data (e.g., smart card data, transit network data, and bus trajectory data) collected in Shenzhen City, China. Evaluation of our prototype demonstrates that the proposed visual analytics approach offers a scalable and effective solution for discovering meaningful travel patterns across large metropolitan areas.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Diao Lin ◽  
Ruoxin Zhu

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Buses are considered as an important type of feeder model for urban metro systems. It is important to understand the integration of buses and metro systems for promoting public transportation. Using smart card data generated by automatic fare collection systems, we aim at exploring the characteristics of bus-and-metro integration. Taking Shanghai as a case study, we first introduced a rule-based method to extract metro trips and bus-and-metro trips from the raw smart card records. Based on the identified trips, we conducted three analyses to explore the characteristics of bus-and-metro integration. The first analysis showed that 46% users have at least two times of using buses to access metro stations during five weekdays. By combining the ridership of metro and bus-and-metro, the second analysis examined how the share of buses as the feeder mode change across space and time. Results showed that the share of buses as the feeder mode in morning peak hours is much larger than in afternoon peak hours, and metro stations away from the city center tend to have a larger share. Pearson correlation test was employed in the third analysis to explore the factors associated with the ratios of bus-and-metro trips. The metro station density and access metro duration are positively associated with the ratios. The number of bus lines around 100&amp;thinsp;m to 400&amp;thinsp;m of metro stations all showed a negative association, and the coefficient for 200&amp;thinsp;m is the largest. In addition, the temporal differences of the coefficients also suggest the importance of a factor might change with respect to different times. These results enhanced our understanding of the integration of buses and metro systems.</p>


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