Human movement patterns of different racial-ethnic and economic groups in U.S. top 50 populated cities: What can social media tell us about isolation?

ABSTRACT Many studies have proven that human movement patterns are strongly impacted by individual socioeconomic and demographic background. While many efforts have been made on exploring the influences of age and gender on movement patterns using social media, this study aims to analyse and compare the movement patterns among different racial-ethnic and economic groups using social media (i.e. geotagged tweets) from the U.S. top 50 populated cities. Results show that there are significant differences in number of activity zones and median travel distance across cities and demographic groups, and that power-laws tend to be captured in both spatial and demographic aspects. Additionally, the analysis of outbound-city travels demonstrates that some cities have slightly stronger interaction with others, and that economically disadvantaged populations and racial-ethnic minorities are more restricted in long distance travels, indicating that their spatial mobility is more limited to the local scale. Lastly, an economically-segregated movement pattern is discovered – upper-class neighbourhoods are mostly visited by the upper-class, while lower-class neighbourhoods are mainly accessed by the lower-class – but some racial-ethnic groups can diversify this segregated pattern in the local scale.