An Investigation of Intra-Urban Mobility Pattern of Taxi Passengers

The study of human mobility patterns is of both theoretical and practical values in many aspects. For long-distance travels, a few research endeavors have shown that the displacements of human travels follow the power-law distribution. However, controversies remain in the issue of the scaling law of human mobility in intra-urban areas. In this work we focus on the mobility pattern of taxi passengers by examining five datasets of the three metropolitans of New York, Dalian and Nanjing. Through statistical analysis, we find that the lognormal distribution with a power-law tail can best approximate both the displacement and the duration time of taxi trips, as well as the vacant time of taxicabs, in all the examined cities. The universality of scaling law of human mobility is subsequently discussed, in accordance with the data analytics.