Examining the directionality of mobility patterns in activity spaces: introducing the ‘mobility snowflake’ visual analytic and measurement framework

Activity spaces characterise an individual's mobility patterns and provide critical insights important to a broad suite of applications. Emergent forms of disaggregate space-time data offer new opportunities to exploit a more granular approach to measuring and visualising activity spaces. Drawing on individual GPS trajectories for 365 participants covering a seven-day period the current paper presents a new measurement and visualisation framework examining the directionality of mobility patterns. This framework moves beyond existing work that measures activity spaces via a simple geometric shape (traditionally a convex hull) to introduce a new metric and associated visual analytic capturing a new dimension of the concept. Results have important consequences for policy and planning, with the hope that the framework can be redeployed across various situational and cultural contexts, leading to the creation of an expanding collection of comparative studies.