Uncovering Correlations Between Urban Road Network Centrality and Human Mobility

Abstract Urban planners have been long interested in understanding how urban structure and activities are mutually influenced. What are the forces that lead to the current patens of road network and what is the influence of the latter's structure on urban activities? Network centrality measures have been traditionally utilized to uncover the structural properties of urban street networks. In this paper we are interested in examining the correlation between the centrality of street network and the intensity of human movement in urban areas. We focus on two cities and we utilize a dataset of geo-tagged tweets that can form a proxy to urban mobility and the corresponding street networks as obtained from OpenStreeMap. Our results indicate that different centrality metrics have different levels of correlations with the intensity of human movement. Furthermore, the strength of the correlation varies in the two cities examined.