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Abstract The analysis of pedestrian GPS datasets is fundamental to further advance on the study and the design of walkable cities. The highest resolution GPS data can characterize micro-mobility patterns and pedestrians’ micro-motives in relation to a small-scale urban context. Purposed-based recurrent mobility data inside people’s neighbourhoods is an important source in these sorts of studies. However, micro-mobility around people’s homes is generally unavailable, and if data exists, it is generally not shareable often due to privacy issues. Citizen science and its public involvement practices in scientific research are valid options to circumvent these challenges and provide meaningful datasets for walkable cities. The study presents GPS records from single-day home-to-school pedestrian mobility of 10 schools in the Barcelona Metropolitan area (Spain). The research provides pedestrian mobility from an age-homogeneous group of people. The study shares processed records with specific filtering, cleaning, and interpolation procedures that can facilitate and accelerate data usage. Citizen science practices during the whole research process are reported to offer a complete perspective of the data collected.

Understanding human mobility is of vital importance for urban planning, epidemiology, and many other fields that draw policies from the activities of humans in space. Despite the recent availability of large-scale data sets of GPS traces or mobile phone records capturing human mobility, typically only a subsample of the population of interest is represented, giving a possibly incomplete picture of the entire system under study. Methods to reliably extract mobility information from such reduced data and to assess their sampling biases are lacking. To that end, we analyzed a data set of millions of taxi movements in New York City. We first show that, once they are appropriately transformed, mobility patterns are highly stable over long time scales. Based on this observation, we develop a supersampling methodology to reliably extrapolate mobility records from a reduced sample based on an entropy maximization procedure, and we propose a number of network-based metrics to assess the accuracy of the predicted vehicle flows. Our approach provides a well founded way to exploit temporal patterns to save effort in recording mobility data, and opens the possibility to scale up data from limited records when information on the full system is required.