Promoting sustainable human mobility for income segregation mitigation.

Abstract

Unraveling urban income segregation fosters social cohesion, urban sustainability, and equitable access to public resources and opportunities for all socioeconomic groups. Here, we show that locations with different segregation levels exhibit biased collective mobility patterns, tending to visit locations with lower segregation levels, which escalate with city size and infrastructure accessibility, and cannot be explained solely by distance and population. Using 1.4 million data points on human mobility, socioeconomic factors, and environmental pollution from 16,093 census tracts in 10 large US cities, we introduce the segregation visitation index to quantify this tendency and develop a human mobility model incorporating segregation constraints and a transfer ensemble optimization component, providing a structural interpretation for the discovered biased mobility. Our results reveal the intricate interplays among urban income segregation, mobility, and environmental exposure, emphasizing the importance of accounting for location-specific mobility differences in developing sustainable income segregation mitigation strategies.