TY - JOUR
T1 - Understanding taxi travel patterns
AU - Cai, Hua
AU - Zhan, Xiaowei
AU - Zhu, Ji
AU - Jia, Xiaoping
AU - Chiu, Anthony S F
AU - Xu, Ming
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
PY - 2016/9/1
Y1 - 2016/9/1
N2 - Taxis play important roles in modern urban transportation systems, especially in mega cities. While providing necessary amenities, taxis also significantly contribute to traffic congestion, urban energy consumption, and air pollution. Understanding the travel patterns of taxis is thus important for addressing many urban sustainability challenges. Previous research has primarily focused on examining the statistical properties of passenger trips, which include only taxi trips occupied with passengers. However, unoccupied trips are also important for urban sustainability issues because they represent potential opportunities to improve the efficiency of the transportation system. Therefore, we need to understand the travel patterns of taxis as an integrated system, instead of focusing only on the occupied trips. In this study we examine GPS trajectory data of 11,880 taxis in Beijing, China for a period of three weeks. Our results show that taxi travel patterns share similar traits with travel patterns of individuals but also exhibit differences. Trip displacement distribution of taxi travels is statistically greater than the exponential distribution and smaller than the truncated power-law distribution. The distribution of short trips (less than 30 miles) can be best fitted with power-law while long trips follow exponential decay. We use radius of gyration to characterize individual taxi's travel distance and find that it does not follow a truncated power-law as observed in previous studies. Spatial and temporal regularities exist in taxi travels. However, with increasing spatial coverage, taxi trips can exhibit dual high probability density centers.
AB - Taxis play important roles in modern urban transportation systems, especially in mega cities. While providing necessary amenities, taxis also significantly contribute to traffic congestion, urban energy consumption, and air pollution. Understanding the travel patterns of taxis is thus important for addressing many urban sustainability challenges. Previous research has primarily focused on examining the statistical properties of passenger trips, which include only taxi trips occupied with passengers. However, unoccupied trips are also important for urban sustainability issues because they represent potential opportunities to improve the efficiency of the transportation system. Therefore, we need to understand the travel patterns of taxis as an integrated system, instead of focusing only on the occupied trips. In this study we examine GPS trajectory data of 11,880 taxis in Beijing, China for a period of three weeks. Our results show that taxi travel patterns share similar traits with travel patterns of individuals but also exhibit differences. Trip displacement distribution of taxi travels is statistically greater than the exponential distribution and smaller than the truncated power-law distribution. The distribution of short trips (less than 30 miles) can be best fitted with power-law while long trips follow exponential decay. We use radius of gyration to characterize individual taxi's travel distance and find that it does not follow a truncated power-law as observed in previous studies. Spatial and temporal regularities exist in taxi travels. However, with increasing spatial coverage, taxi trips can exhibit dual high probability density centers.
KW - Human mobility dynamics
KW - Taxi travel pattern
KW - Vehicle trajectory
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U2 - 10.1016/j.physa.2016.03.047
DO - 10.1016/j.physa.2016.03.047
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84964687541
SN - 0378-4371
VL - 457
SP - 590
EP - 597
JO - Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications
JF - Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications
ER -