Exploring the Influence from London Development on London Underground Mobility Through Network Analysis

As cities grows up, people continue to gather in cities, and human activities in cities have become more intense than ever before. These human activities will subtly reshape urban space, causing significant transformation of the urban physical environment and socio-economic environment. The method of big data provides a promising perspective for us to explore the impact of human activities on the urban environment. This study investigates the commuting patterns of London citizens in the subway and explores the impact of human activities on the importance of network nodes in subway stations. We use network analysis to characterize the node’s importance through degree, closeness, and betweenness centrality, and then compare these centralities with the centrality with the human mobility as weight. The result shows that the node’s importance based on centrality characteristics are largely reshaped by human mobility, which in turn drive the government to build new lines to hold the mobility flow. This research is helpful for providing insights for the London subway and urban construction.