Understanding the mobility pattern of passenger-searching taxis

The study of taxi drivers' behavior has always been a hot topic and help us gain a better understanding to some social phenomenon such as traffic congestion and population mobility. This paper made a deep research about the taxi's mobility pattern based on the data collected from taxis in Beijing. Unlike previous work, we took only the empty-running taxis' traces as our target and found that the mobility of empty taxis which are looking for passengers exhibited truncated Lévy flight behavior. The trip length distribution can be well fitted by an improved truncated power law and the scaling exponent is α = 1.4. The trip direction distributed uniformly under the street layout of Beijing, nearly being 1 : 1 : 1 : 1 in east, south, west and north. Besides, the distribution shows a strong correlation with the distribution of road segments direction in Beijing, and were deeply influenced by the population density as well.