Urban Mobility Data Analysis for Public Transportation Systems: A Case Study in Montevideo, Uruguay

Abstract

Transportation systems play a major role in modern urban contexts, where citizens are expected to travel in order to engage in social and economic activities. Modern transportation systems incorporate technologies that generate huge volumes of data, which can be processed to extract valuable mobility information. This article describes a proposal for studying public transportation systems following an urban data analysis approach. A thorough analysis of the transportation system in Montevideo, Uruguay, and its usage is outlined, combining several sources of urban data. Furthermore, origin-destination matrices, which describe mobility patterns in the city, are generated using ticket sales data. The computed results are validated with a recent mobility survey. Finally, a visualization web application is presented, which allows conveying mobility information in an intuitive way.