Understanding mobility patterns

Large amounts of geolocated traces are being collected that enable the analysis of mobility patterns. This can be useful for better managing existing as well as planning future transport systems. ML offers great potential to progress the following areas:


 * Vehicle and road detection
 * Analysis and classification of travel patterns
 * Understanding the interplay between urban form and mobility

Vehicle and road detection
To better understand existing transport systems, machine learning can be used to detect the structure of a transport network as well as its utilisation. In the context of highly congested cities (especially with parked cars), vehicle detection can be of high value to support the discussion for a more equal street space allocation, which in turn creates space for more low carbon mobility, such walking or riding a bicycle.

Analysis and Classification of Travel Patterns
The analysis and classification of travel patterns serves to better understand urban mobility flows. As human mobility in urban areas follow strong regularities, this understanding constitutes the basis for making short- and long-term predictions of mobility demand.

Impact of urban form on mobility
Machine Learning can be used to assess how a given local context, such as the urban form, impacts mobility. Building up on this, planning strategies can be derived which support a low carbon transport future.

Vehicle and road detection
“Fast deep vehicle detection in aerial images (2017)” : An example of how high-resolution images can be used to detect vehicles.

Analysis and Classification of Travel Patterns
“Urban Human Mobility Data Mining (2016)” : An Overview This paper provides a great overview of the complete modelling process, from finding potential data sets, cleaning and preprocessing data sets, searching for patterns using ML, evaluating models and obtained patterns as well as acting on discovered knowledge. When it comes to finding mobility patterns, the authors also highlight different predictors and their applicability in different contexts.

“Truck traffic monitoring with satellite images (2019)” : An example of how satellite images can be utilised to detect average road traffic.

“Mining smart card data for transit riders' travel patterns (2013)”. An example of how smart card data is used to model travel patterns of transit riders in Beijing.

Impact of urban form on mobility:
“Applying gradient boosting decision trees to examine non-linear effects of the built environment on driving distance in Oslo (2018)” : An example of how gradient boost decision trees are used to examine the effect of urban form on mobility.