2022/04/27 by Lei Dong, Dong, Lei, Yu Liu +6 · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #FOS: Economics and business #FOS: Physical sciences #General Economics (econ.GN) #Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Transportation Planning and Optimization #Urban Transport and Accessibility
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2204.12865
openalex publication_date 2022/04/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Commuting is a key mechanism that governs the dynamics of cities. Despite its importance, very little is known of the properties and mechanisms underlying this crucial urban process. Here, we capitalize on ∼ 50 million individuals' smartphone data from 234 Chinese cities to show that urban commuting obeys remarkable regularities. These regularities can be generalized as two laws: (i) the scale-invariance of the average commuting distance across cities, which is a long-awaited validation of Marchetti's constant conjecture, and (ii) a universal inverted U-shape of the commuting distance as a function of the distance from the city centre within cities, indicating that the city centre's attraction is bounded. Motivated by such empirical findings, we develop a simple urban growth model that connects individual-level mobility choices with macroscopic urban spatial structure and faithfully explains both commuting laws. Our results further show that the scale-invariants of human mobility will ultimately lead to the polycentric transition in cities, which could be used to better inform urban development strategies.