realTRIPS

Urban mobility analysis, advanced by the emerging fine-granularity location data (e.g., smart card data, mobile phone data and social media data), has received significant attention in recent years.

It has become an important subject for understanding the functionality, ever-increasing dynamism and complexity of urban space. realTRIPS aims to open a new avenue of research in urban mobility analysis using emerging automatic data by developing an analytical and modelling framework, particularly addressing variability across spatiotemporal scales. I argue that variability of mobility patterns should not be simply interpreted as a number of errors but as an indicator of changes in regular human behaviours impacted by land use and transport at different scales.

A deeper understanding of variability would contribute to a more accurate evaluation of land use and transport impacts in terms of affected area and effect time. The relevant theories and measures on variability have been long-researched in spatial statistics, but not well applied to the context of urban mobility studies.

The proposed framework will take advantage of the research progress in multiple disciplines and leverage key concepts from uncertainty in spatial analysis, time geography, and land use transport planning. Under this framework, new variability measures will be developed and integrated as a function of space and time into operational urban models for predicting impacts of land use and transport on people’s travel and location choices at different spatiotemporal scales. Case studies representing typical urban contexts (i.e. London, Shenzhen, and Nairobi) will be explored to demonstrate the feasibility and generic applicability of the proposed framework, analytical methods and urban models. 

This project runs from February 2021 to January 2026.