Exploring human movements in Singapore: a comparative analysis based on mobile phone and taxicab usages

Existing studies extensively utilized taxicab trips and individuals' movements captured by mobile phone usages (referred as "mobile phone movements" hereafter) to understand human mobility patterns in an area. However, all these studies analyze taxicab trips and mobile phone movements separately. In this paper, we: (1) integrate mobile phone and taxicab usages together to explore human movements in Singapore and reveal that mobile phone movements as a general proxy to all kinds of human mobility has substantially different characteristics compared to taxicab trips, which are one of the frequently used means of transportation; (2) investigate the ratio of taxicab trips and mobile phone movements between two arbitrary locations, which not only characterizes taxicab demands between these locations but also sheds light on underlying land use patterns. In details, we quantify the distinct characteristics of mobile phone movements and taxicab trips, and particularly confirm that the number of taxicab trips decays with distance more slowly compared to mobile phone movements. From a spatial network perspective, taxicab trips largely reflect interactions between further-separating locations than mobile phone movements, resulting in emergence of larger spatial communities (delineated based on people mobility) in Singapore. The contribution of this research is two-fold: (1) we clarified the divergences between observed human mobility patterns based on taxicab and mobile phone data; (2) we implemented an integrated approach of taxicab and mobile phone usages for gaining more informative insights in population dynamics, transportation and urban configuration.