Cities moving - Datastories

Author: Liuhuaying Yang

To quantify the motorisation of urban mobility, Rafael Prieto-Curiel from Complexity Science Hub and Juan P. Ospina from EAFIT University model the number of kilometres travelled by different modes of transport in a city by aggregating A) active mobility, B) public transport and C) cars. Their findings suggest that although public transport is more prominent in large cities, it is insufficient to reduce the distance travelled by car users within the city and their emissions. Using their model, which includes data from over 800 cities across 61 countries (as of October 17, 2023), the ternary visualizations allows to compare the proportion of journeys to work in different countries in regions. Each circle represents a specific country, with its size reflecting the country's population. The map shows the cities with over one million population, where the inner circles represent the proportion of commute mode and the outer circle shows the population size.