Mobility science offers a powerful lens for planning cities that are more equitable and sustainable. Cities today face pressing challenges — unequal access to economic opportunities, rising transportation emissions, and the need to better understand how travel behavior evolves in response to social and technological change. This presentation brings together three interconnected studies that advance our understanding of how people move through cities and the social and spatial forces that drive those patterns.
The first study introduces WorkReach, a discrete choice model that integrates economic complexity and residential informality into work location utility functions to reconstruct commuting flows across cities in the U.S., Mexico, and Brazil. By grounding accessibility in perceived utility rather than physical proximity alone, WorkReach reveals how workers trade distance for job quality depending on their socioeconomic context, uncovering consistent yet regionally differentiated patterns of labor market access.
The second study examines the spatial diffusion of plug-in electric vehicles by integrating social network dynamics into adoption forecasting. Using empirical data from California and Washington, it shows that accounting for spatial social networks substantially lowers long-term adoption projections and better reproduces observed spatial autocorrelation, with direct implications for grid planning and policy design.
Finally, we trace the restructuring of urban mobility across 15 U.S. metropolitan areas between 2019 and 2024. To contextualize behavioral shifts across diverse urban contexts, the study introduces a computational framework that delineates functional urban form from mobility data: synthesizing population compactness, mobility centrality, and employment concentration. Despite a threefold increase in remote work, car travel increased, and is driven by more frequent, shorter trips. But compact and employment concentrated cities show the greatest mitigation of this growth.
Together, they show how complexity science and mobility data can help build more livable and sustainable cities.
Marta Gonzalez, Professor, University of California Berkeley
Host: Istvan Kovacs
Joan West
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