A physiological model of human mobility: A global study

Abstract

Abstract The movement of people has led to several challenges in terms of traffic congestion, energy consumption, emissions and climate change. Human mobility modelling is currently described mainly through socio-economic variables, such as travel time, travel costs, income and car-ownership. The overall objective of this paper is to relate mobility behaviour based on measurable entities of travel time and distance and the entities of speed. A simple underlying mechanism of human mobility is presented based on the human energy expended. The energy is related firstly to the average values of travel modes. Explicit formulas for the distribution within each travel mode are developed and the concept is also shown to apply to multi-modal mobility. The approach is described in its most basic and fundamental form, but opens up perspectives for new applications and analyses approaches to transport modelling, planning and appraisals. The approach shows that travel time and distance are consistently inversely proportional and limited by the physiological power consumption. The basic hypothesis and the related verifications is shown on all modal combinations of daily mobility with a median R 2 of around 0.8. The approach is validated using national travel surveys of Germany, Switzerland, UK and US, spanning over five decades to 2018.