One-sided or two-sided love? Visualizing connections between metro station pairs in Beijing

Abstract

As more and more metro lines and stations have started serving our metropolises, they have (re)shaped our travels and lives, creating (new) venues and (additional) opportunities for serendipitous contacts. To know the odds and locales of serendipitous contacts among millions of metro riders, we employ the smartcard data of the metro riders in Beijing to visualize metro riders’ identifical trip trajectories and to visualize/disclose connections between metro station pairs because of these trajectories. We find that the pairs that produce the largest and smallest numbers of identifical trip trajectories are not randomly distributed in the city. Rather, they concentrate in the northwest and in the central, respectively.