Identifying and understanding road-constrained areas of interest (AOIs) through spatiotemporal taxi GPS data: A case study in New York City

Urban areas of interest (AOIs) represent areas within the urban environment featuring high levels of public interaction, with their understanding holding utility for a wide range of urban planning applications. Within this context, our study proposes a novel space-time analytical framework and implements it to the taxi GPS data for the extent of Manhattan, NYC to identify and describe 31 road-constrained AOIs in terms of their spatiotemporal distribution and contextual characteristics. Our analysis captures many important locations, including but not limited to primary transit hubs, famous cultural venues, open spaces, and some other tourist attractions, prominent landmarks, and commercial centres. Moreover, we respectively analyse these AOIs in terms of their dynamics and contexts by performing further clustering analysis, formulating five temporal clusters delineating the dynamic evolution of the AOIs and four contextual clusters representing their salient contextual characteristics.