MIT Senseable City Lab - Urban Mobility [P.Santi, C.Heine]

Using mathematical models to predict where and how often we go

Understanding the patterns underlying human mobility in urban areas is essential to better plan cities, engineering traffic, and mitigating diseases. However, existing studies have characterized only some spatial features of mobility — such as travel distance — overlooking an important temporal feature: how frequently do we visit a particular place? And, how is this visitation frequency related to the distance we traveled? Modeling the interplay between the spatial and temporal features of mobility is critical; for instance, it can provide urban planners with the information to best place a shopping mall to attract customers.

This webinar will walk the audience through the discovery, based on the analysis of over 8 billion human mobility traces collected over four continents. The results display that humans have a natural tendency of trading off travel distance with frequency: the further we travel, the less frequently we do it, according to a “visitation law” that can be described through a simple mathematical law. We will then show how this striking discovery can be used to better locate businesses and facilities in urban spaces and find effective containment strategies for disease spreading.