Unravelling the spatial directionality of urban mobility

Abstract As it is central to sustainable urban development, urban mobility has primarily been scrutinised for its scaling and hierarchical properties. However, traditional analyses frequently overlook spatial directionality, a critical factor in city centre congestion and suburban development. Here, we apply vector computation to unravel the spatial directionality of urban mobility, introducing a two-dimensional anisotropy-centripetality metric. Utilising travel data from 90 million mobile users across 60 Chinese cities, we effectively quantify mobility patterns through this metric, distinguishing between strong monocentric, weak monocentric, and polycentric patterns. Our findings highlight a notable difference: residents in monocentric cities face increasing commuting distances as cities expand, in contrast to the consistent commuting patterns observed in polycentric cities. Notably, mobility anisotropy intensifies in the outskirts of monocentric cities, whereas it remains uniform in polycentric settings. Additionally, centripetality wanes as one moves from the urban core, with a steeper decline observed in polycentric cities. Finally, we reveal that employment attraction strength and commuting distance scaling are key to explaining these divergent urban mobility patterns. These insights are important for shaping effective policies aimed at alleviating congestion and guiding suburban housing development.