Weekday Commuting Costs and Weekend Recreational Mobility Conditions: A U-Shaped Relationship in the Jobs–Housing–Recreation Spatial Structure

Weekday commuting and weekend recreation are two mobility domains through which urban spatial structure shapes residents’ well-being and urban functioning, yet direct empirical evidence on how they are related remains limited. This study investigates how weekday commuting costs and weekend recreational mobility conditions are related within a jobs–housing–recreation spatial framework, using individual-level location-based services (LBS) data from the central urban area of Chongqing, China. Generalized additive models reveal a nonlinear and range-dependent commuting–recreation relationship. Distance-based and driving-time specifications provide the main evidence for a U-shaped relationship, whereas transit-time specifications do not clearly reproduce this pattern, reflecting short-distance cost overestimation and spatially shared public-transport constraints rather than realised mobility conditions. From a spatial-configuration perspective, this pattern suggests that work-related and recreational mobility conditions are unevenly combined across residential locations, rather than simply aligned or opposed. It also suggests that relatively favourable commuting and recreational mobility conditions can coexist within some residential contexts. Rather than establishing a universal rule, the Chongqing case provides a testable hypothesis that may be relevant to large cities with uneven and partially aligned employment, housing, transport, and recreational opportunities. The study provides an empirical entry point for integrated spatial-performance diagnosis and future evaluation of alternative jobs–housing–recreation configurations.