Multi-day mobility motifs: method and applications

The sustainable turn in urban territories is manifold and must not rely solely on technologies to address energy efficiency. This research proposes a set of metrics as a preliminary work to further study day-to-day variability in activity-travel behaviors. On the one hand, locational variability addresses the spatial familiarity of individuals’ activity space. On the other hand, temporal variability addresses the structure of schedules and time-allocation. Daily activity structures are abstracted at the level of mobility motifs (unweighted directed-graphs) and measures of recurrent and frequent activity spaces are obtained by mean of centrography and longitudinal spatial analysis. The main objective of this paper is to expose and validate the methodology employed to capture temporal and locational patterns in multi-day activity-travel behaviors. The results are based on a fine-grained eight-week travel-diary collected in Switzerland in 2019, and focus on the statistical description and spatio-temporal meaning of four activity-travel behavior metrics: complexity, home shift, regularity and proximity. Combining these metrics with socio-demographics reveals important behavioral characteristics in terms of gender, household size, car-use and general accessibility.