Comparing General Mobility and Mobility by Car

Abstract

In the last years, the emergence of big data led scientists from diverse disciplines toward the study of the laws underlying human mobility. Although these recent discoveries have shed light on very interesting and fascinating aspects about people movements, they are generally focused on global and general mobility patterns. For this reason, they do not necessarily capture phenomena related to specific types of mobility, such as mobility by car, by public transportations means, by foot and so on. In this work, we aim to compare general human mobility with mobility expressed by a specific conveyance, trying to address the following question: What are the differences between general mobility and mobility by car? To answer this question, we present the results of an analysis performed on a big mobile phone dataset and on a GPS dataset storing information about car travels in Italy.