National-Scale Spatiotemporal Variation in Driver Navigation Behaviour and Route Choice (Short Paper)

Understanding human behaviour is an integral task in GIScience, facilitated by increasingly large and descriptive datasets on human activity. Large-scale trajectory data have been particularly useful in measuring behaviours in different contexts, and understanding the relationship between the built environment and people. Yet, to date, most of these studies have focused on urban or regional scale analyses, with less exploration of behavioural variation at larger spatial scales. Human navigation behaviour is inherently linked to variation in spatial structure, and a study of national variations could help to better understand this variability. In this paper, we analyse GPS data from over 1 million journeys by 50,000 connected cars across the UK. Some key statistics relating to route choice are computed, and their variations are explored over time and space. A k-mean clustering of the trips identifies different types of trips and shows that their distribution varies by time of day and across the country. The insights gained from the data highlight spatio-temporal variations in road navigation, which should be considered in transportation modelling and planning.