"The Chained Trip"
A contradiction in mobility research: surveys show women's travel patterns are more complex than men's, but digital trace data suggested less diverse movement. De Sojo, Lehmann, and Alessandretti resolve it using smartphone trajectories from 543,155 individuals across ten countries, modeled not as point visits but as networks of sequential trips.
Women's mobility networks are simultaneously more clustered and more home-anchored โ visiting fewer unique locations but connecting them more densely. The apparent simplicity of fewer destinations masked a more sophisticated organizational strategy: trip chaining. Women link multiple stops into single journeys, spanning up to 150 kilometers and multiple days, visiting several destinations sequentially rather than making separate trips to each.
The result is higher travel efficiency. By chaining, women achieve greater distance savings across their monthly travel sequences. They don't go to fewer places โ they go to the same places with fewer total kilometers. The aggregate metric of "number of unique locations" captured the wrong dimension. The network structure of how locations connect captured the right one.
The methodological lesson is as important as the substantive finding. Aggregate metrics can hide organizational structure. A network that visits ten nodes looks less diverse than one visiting fifteen, but if the ten-node network chains them into efficient multi-stop routes while the fifteen-node network makes fifteen separate trips, the ten-node network is doing more with less. The diversity of a mobility pattern isn't the count of destinations โ it's the structure of the connections between them.
