Exploring Intra-Urban Travel Mobility Using Large-Scale Taxi Global Positioning System Trajectories

Using taxi GPS trajectories data is of very importance to explore Spatio-temporal features of human mobility in transportation designing and planning. The data were collected from taxi GPS devices in Harbin city during a week. The taxi trips are extracted from GPS data, and travel distance and time in occupied and vacant states are firstly used to investigate the human mobility. Then, the urban area is divided into 400 grids. Furthermore, travelling network corresponding to taxi trips are designed to further examine the dynamics of mobility, in which the grid are considered as nodes and edge weights are defined as total number of trips among nodes. We observe some basic statistical features of network: degree, edge weights, clustering coefficients and network structure entropy. We also use the correlation between strength and degree to analyze the significance of nodes. Based on network analysis, we select two grids, a central business district and a residential district with high degree and strength, to study the spatial and temporal properties of trips that start from and end at these two grids. Finally, the correlation between trip volume and operation efficiency is explored and we find that hourly trip volume express negative correlation with operation efficiency.