Our new paper entitled “Conserved quantities in human mobility: From locations to trips” was accepted at Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies and is now available online.
We use two high-resolution user-labelled datasets from ~3800 individuals to analyse individuals’ activity–travel behaviour over the long term. We find that individuals maintain a conserved quantity in the number of essential travel mode and activity location combinations over time. A typical individual maintains 15 mode–location combinations, of which 7 are travelled with a private vehicle every 5 weeks. The dynamics of this stability reveal that the exploration speed of locations is faster than the one for travel modes, and they can both be well-modelled using a power-law fit that slows down over time.
Our findings enrich the understanding of the long-term intra-person variability in activity–travel behaviour and open new possibilities for designing mobility simulation models.
Check out the open-access paper online!
