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Urban mobility and the experienced isolation of students

Nature Cities volume 1, pages 73–82 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Cities provide access to stores, public amenities and other people, but that access may provide less benefit for the lower-income and younger urbanites who lack money and means of easy mobility. Using detailed GPS location data, we measure the urban mobility and experienced racial and economic isolation of the young and the disadvantaged. We find that students in major metropolitan areas experience more racial and income isolation, spend more time at home, stay closer to home when they do leave, and visit fewer restaurants and retail establishments than adults. Looking across levels of income, students from higher-income families visit more amenities, spend more time outside of the home, and explore more unique locations than low-income students. Combining a number of measures into an index of urban mobility, we find that, conditional on income, urban mobility is positively correlated with home neighborhood characteristics such as distance from the urban core, car ownership and social capital.

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Fig. 1: Urban mobility of students by income.
Fig. 2: Correlates of urban mobility.

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Data availability

The primary data that support the findings are provided by Replica, an urban data platform, and are provided under a restricted agreement for the current study. Therefore, it is not publicly available. Other data in the study come from the census and are accessed via IPUMS, a database of census and survey data housed at the University of Minnesota, as well as from Opportunity Insights, an economics research laboratory at Harvard.

Code availability

The primary data that support the findings are provided by Replica, an urban data platform, and are provided under a restricted agreement for the current study and are thus not publicly available. As running the code for this Article requires proprietary data, it is also not publicly available, but can be provided upon request.

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Acknowledgements

This project was reviewed and determined exempt by the Stanford Institutional Review Board (protocol IRB-62185). E.G. acknowledges support from the Star Family Challenge for Promising Scientific Research. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. No specific funding was provided for this work. C.C. was a contractor with Replica before the beginning of this study and no longer has any material financial interests. We thank K. Jain and A. Pozdnoukhov at Replica for facilitating access to the data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stanford GSB, Stanford, CA, USA

    Cody Cook

  2. Department of Economics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Lindsey Currier & Edward Glaeser

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  1. Cody Cook
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  2. Lindsey Currier
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  3. Edward Glaeser
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All authors contributed equally.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lindsey Currier.

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Nature Cities thanks Christopher Browning and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Sections A.1–A.4, discussing data, and Supplementary Sections B.1–B.4, presenting additional results mentioned in the main text.

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Cook, C., Currier, L. & Glaeser, E. Urban mobility and the experienced isolation of students. Nat Cities 1, 73–82 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-023-00007-3

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