There is a contradiction at the heart of our current understanding of individual and collective mobility patterns. On the one hand, a highly influential body of literature on human mobility driven by analyses of massive empirical datasets finds that human movements show no evidence of characteristic spatial scales. There, human mobility is described as scale free1-3. On the other hand, geographically, the concept of scale-referring to meaningful levels of description from individual buildings to neighbourhoods, cities, regions and countries-is central for the description of various aspects of human behaviour, such as socioeconomic interactions, or political and cultural dynamics4,5. Here we resolve this apparent paradox by showing that day-to-day human mobility does indeed contain meaningful scales, corresponding to spatial 'containers' that restrict mobility behaviour. The scale-free results arise from aggregating displacements across containers. We present a simple model-which given a person's trajectory-infers their neighbourhood, city and so on, as well as the sizes of these geographical containers. We find that the containers-characterizing the trajectories of more than 700,000 individuals-do indeed have typical sizes. We show that our model is also able to generate highly realistic trajectories and provides a way to understand the differences in mobility behaviour across countries, gender groups and urban-rural areas.

中文翻译：

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人类流动的尺度

我们目前对个人和集体流动模式的理解存在核心矛盾。一方面，通过对大量经验数据集的分析驱动的关于人类流动性的极具影响力的文献发现，人类运动没有显示出特征空间尺度的证据。在那里，人员流动被描述为无尺度 1-3。另一方面，在地理上，尺度概念——指的是从单个建筑物到街区、城市、地区和国家的有意义的描述水平——是描述人类行为的各个方面的核心，例如社会经济互动，或政治和文化动态4,5。在这里，我们通过展示日常人类流动确实包含有意义的尺度来解决这个明显的悖论，对应于空间“容器” 限制移动行为。无标度结果来自于跨容器聚合位移。我们提出了一个简单的模型——给定一个人的轨迹——推断他们的社区、城市等，以及这些地理容器的大小。我们发现容器——表征超过 700,000 个人的轨迹——确实具有典型的尺寸。我们表明，我们的模型还能够生成高度逼真的轨迹，并提供一种方法来了解不同国家、性别群体和城乡地区的流动行为差异。以及这些地理容器的大小。我们发现容器——表征超过 700,000 个人的轨迹——确实具有典型的尺寸。我们表明，我们的模型还能够生成高度逼真的轨迹，并提供一种方法来了解不同国家、性别群体和城乡地区的流动行为差异。以及这些地理容器的大小。我们发现容器——表征超过 700,000 个人的轨迹——确实具有典型的尺寸。我们表明，我们的模型还能够生成高度逼真的轨迹，并提供一种方法来了解不同国家、性别群体和城乡地区的流动行为差异。