Mobility patterns and impact of urban sprawl: analysis of Valencia province using new data sources

The aim of the paper is to obtain mobility parameters from the urban area of Valencia using geolocated data from Twitter. The objectives are: recognizing the scale of the movements depending on the visit frequency and quantifying the impact of the urban sprawl on the distances covered. Methodology stalls locating the homes of Twitter users in order to use this position as the basis for the analysis. Once home location is obtained for each user, the rest of the positions are classified taking into account the number of times a place is visited. We distinguish between frequently and occasionally visited places. In this way, we observe habitual life spaces, where strategies of time consumption are reflected, and occasional life spaces, where movements are not so influenced by the distance. Finally, the impact of urban sprawl in the mobility is measured using distances covered by residents in discontinuous urban areas in comparison of residents in continuous urban areas. Results confirm the impact of discontinuous urbanization on the mobility with an average increase of 4 Km.