Energy and Scaling Laws in Human Travel Behaviour

Abstract

We show that energy concepts can contribute to the understanding of human travel behaviour. First, the average travel times for different modes of transportation are inversely proportional to the energy consumption rates measured for the respective physical activities. Second, when daily travel-time distributions by different modes of transport such as walking, cycling, bus or car travel are appropriately scaled, they turn out to have a universal functional relationship. This corresponds to a canonical-like energy distribution with exceptions for short trips, which can be theoretically explained. Altogether, this points to a law of constant average energy consumption by the physical activity of daily travelling. Applying these natural laws could help to improve long-term urban and transport planning.

For related work see http://www.helbing.org

References in corpus (2)

• Modeling Supply Networks and Business Cycles as Unstable Transport Phenomena
• Pattern formation in colloidal mixtures under external driving fields

Cited by in corpus (21)

• Human Mobility: Models and Applications
• Scaling laws in the spatial structure of urban road networks
• Understanding Road Usage Patterns in Urban Areas
• The statistical physics of Cities
• Understanding mobility in a social petri dish
• A stochastic model of randomly accelerated walkers for human mobility
• Statistical Laws in Urban Mobility from microscopic GPS data in the area of Florence
• Influence of hydrodynamic interactions on lane formation in oppositely charged driven colloids
• Predictability of road traffic and congestion in urban areas
• Analyzing the dominant SARS-CoV-2 transmission routes towards an ab initio SEIR model
• General scores for accessibility and inequality measures in urban areas
• The Physics of Traffic and Regional Development
• The Impact of Cost and Network Topology on Urban Mobility: A Study of Public Bicycle Usage in 2 U.S. Cities
• Entropic measures of individual mobility patterns
• Anatomy and efficiency of urban multimodal mobility
• Universal properties of multimodal human mobility: a statistical physics point of view
• Accessibility and Delay in Random Temporal Networks
• Unified Mobility Estimation Mode
• Understanding the variability of daily travel-time expenditures using GPS trajectory data
• Understanding the spatiotemporal pattern of grazing cattle movement
• The dimensions of accessibility: proximity, opportunities, values