Comparison of human mobility patterns in different settings

The development of location tracking technologies and big-data analysis capacities makes it possible to understand human mobility patterns at the global level through the analysis of huge datasets made available by open-data communities. Working with millions of empirical world-wide GPS trajectories, we examine users' mobility patterns in urban, rural and intermediate scenarios. Similar scaling properties are found in the analysis of several quantities, including end-to-end distance, radius of gyration, mean-squared displacement, and fixed-interval step-length. The impact of cities is elucidated by comparing mobility patterns in major cities worldwide.