Capturing patterns and radical changes in long-distance mobility by Flickr data

In contrast to daily travel behaviour, long-distance mobility constitutes a poorly understood area in transport research. Only few national household travel surveys include sections on long-distance travel and these usually focus on the trip to the destination without gathering information about mobility behaviour at the destination. Other sources of data on mobility are either restricted to the national level such as cell phone data or to specific modes of transport such as international flight statistics or floating car data. In addition, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has illustrated how difficult it is to grasp abrupt changes in mobility behaviour. Against this background this paper investigates the potential of Flickr data for capturing patterns and radical changes in long-distance mobility. Flickr is a social media online platform allowing its users to upload photos and to comment on their own and other users’ photos. It is mainly used for sharing holiday and travel experiences. The results show that Flickr constitutes a viable source of data for capturing patterns and radical changes in long-distance mobility. The distribution of the travel distances, the travel destinations as well as reduction of the mileage of all holiday trips in 2020 in comparison to 2019 due to the pandemic calculated on the basis of the Flickr data is very similar to the same indicators determined on the basis of a national household travel survey, official passenger flight statistics, and other official transportation statistics. This R code used for this project is stored in an open access repository on Github ( https://github.com/antonlich/flickr_longdistance_mobility.git ). Further usage and development is more than welcome.