A GIS Approach for Revealing Urban Mobility Hotspots: A Case Study of Amman City in Jordan

Transportation management is an essential aspect of sustainable city development, as transportation networks serve humans in their daily activities. Traffic demand is an important input for transportation planning considering the population growth and travel activities increase, which have produced more traffic congestion throughout the years. Normally, traffic congestions are not uniformly distributed across the city, but rather are concentrated in particular locations. These locations are known as hotspots. We developed a framework for studying urban spatiotemporal characteristics of human mobility behavior within Amman city, where a large amount of trajectory data were processed to extract their pick-up and drop-off points. The available data, which was recorded between May and September 2021, is sorted out in an accumulative way to represent the working days of the week. Travel demand was illustrated through a temporal data representation per day interval as the day was divided into three intervals to further understand mobility behavior throughout the day. Then, the Kernel Density Estimation algorithm (KDE) was applied to derive and categorize different significant hotspots that were visually represented using GIS Software as appropriate spatial clustering tools to produce heatmaps. Finally, the correlation between hotspots and their drop-off points was analyzed to understand the factors influencing the mobility pattern such as day intervals and community structure in terms of residential or commercial. The results enable us to build several strategies and recommendations for transportation planners as well as taxi operators.