Eur. Phys. J. B 84, 549-561 (2011)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2011-10872-0

Regular Article

Insights into a spatially embedded social network from a large-scale snowball sample

¹ Berlin Institute of Technology, Group of Transport Systems Planning and Transport Telematics Salzufer 17-19, 10587 Berlin, Germany
² Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich Institute for Transport Planning and Systems ETH Hönggerberg, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland

^a e-mail: illenberger@vsp.tu-berlin.de

Received: 12 November 2010
Received in final form: 27 March 2011
Published online: 25 May 2011

Abstract

Much research has been conducted to obtain insights into the basic laws governing human travel behaviour. While the traditional travel survey has been for a long time the main source of travel data, recent approaches to use GPS data, mobile phone data, or the circulation of bank notes as a proxy for human travel behaviour are promising. The present study proposes a further source of such proxy-data: the social network. We collect data using an innovative snowball sampling technique to obtain details on the structure of a leisure-contacts network. We analyse the network with respect to its topology, the individuals’ characteristics, and its spatial structure. We further show that a multiplication of the functions describing the spatial distribution of leisure contacts and the frequency of physical contacts results in a trip distribution that is consistent with data from the Swiss travel survey.