How can cities quickly create urban mobility models?

In the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from MIT and Ford outlined the computational system used to infer urban mobility patterns using cellphone location data. The project applied the system to the city of Boston for six weeks and created a model that would usually take years to build.

"In the U.S., every metropolitan area has an MPO, which is a metropolitan planning organization, and their main job is to use travel surveys to derive the travel demand model, which is their baseline for predicting and forecasting travel demand to build infrastructure," said Shan Jiang, a postdoc in the Human Mobility and Networks Lab in MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and primary paper author. "So our method and model could be the next generation of tools for the planners to plan for the next generation of infrastructure."

This method of data collection is advantageous to city planners, one researcher explained, because it generates a more accurate model of urban mobility than past methods, which relied on anecdotal data like mobility journals that volunteers kept.

More information on the study can be found at

Phys.org

.