{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/the-universality-in-urban-commuting-across","title":"The universality in urban commuting across and within cities","arxiv_id":"2204.12865","date":"2022-04-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["Lei Dong","Paolo Santi","Yu Liu","Siqi Zheng","Carlo Ratti"],"abstract":"Commuting is a key mechanism that governs the dynamics of cities. Despite its importance, very little is known of the properties and mechanisms underlying this crucial urban process. Here, we capitalize on $\\sim$ 50 million individuals' smartphone data from 234 Chinese cities to show that urban commuting obeys remarkable regularities. These regularities can be generalized as two laws: (i) the scale-invariance of the average commuting distance across cities, which is a long-awaited validation of Marchetti's constant conjecture, and (ii) a universal inverted U-shape of the commuting distance as a function of the distance from the city centre within cities, indicating that the city centre's attraction is bounded. Motivated by such empirical findings, we develop a simple urban growth model that connects individual-level mobility choices with macroscopic urban spatial structure and faithfully explains both commuting laws. Our results further show that the scale-invariants of human mobility will ultimately lead to the polycentric transition in cities, which could be used to better inform urban development strategies.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.12865v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.12865v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"the-universality-in-urban-commuting-across","repo_url":"https://github.com/leiii/commute","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}