Exploring the Mobility Patterns of Public Transport Passengers

The mobility patterns of passengers in a public transport network are explored based on Shijiazhuang bus passengers survey data. The results show that the inflows and outflows of different stations in the network are strongly heterogeneous and the traffic flow among stations follows a power law distribution. The results also show that the travel distance distribution of public transport passengers is peaked, which can be fitted by a negative binomial distribution. The potential mechanism leading to these statistical characteristics are explained by three random walk models, one of which can reproduce the scaling distribution of traffic flow and the peaked distribution of travel distance.