Does Urban Mobility Have a Daily Routine? Learning from the Aggregate Data of Mobile Networks

Abstract

Does the distribution of Rome's population follow routine hourly, daily, or weekly patterns? And if it does, how do such patterns vary in different parts of the city? This paper reports on our investigation of the aggregate patterns of urban mobility in Rome, Italy for which we used novel data from a mobile phone operator. Unlike research that chartered urban mobility through individual travel surveys, our research determined the aggregate distribution of Rome's population over time by using the volume of call activity in mobile network cells as the unit of spatial analysis. In this paper, we first illustrate and confirm that there is significant regularity in urban mobility at different hours, days, and weeks. We then show how mobility between network cells differs at various times, and we account for the differences by using demographic, economic, and (built) environment indicators.