Does e-shopping weaken the link between land use and neighborhood shopping behavior? Evidence from large-scale mobile phone data

Abstract

<p>Proximity-based land use planning has traditionally been viewed as a key strategy to manage travel demand and promote sustainable mobility. Yet, the rise of online activities, particularly the spread of e-shopping, may alter this rationale by reducing the need for physical proximity to consumption opportunities and potentially reshaping residents’ interactions with neighborhood facilities. In this study, we draw on a one-month mobile signaling dataset from Shanghai, China, to provide large-scale behavioral evidence on this issue. Leveraging a Spatial Error Model (SEM), we examine whether e-shopping attenuates the influence of neighborhood land use features on shopping travel behaviors. Our findings show that residents in neighborhoods with higher levels of e-shopping engagement tend to make fewer offline shopping trips and travel shorter distances. More importantly, e-shopping moderates — and in many cases attenuates — the effects of key proximity-based features, including proximity to commercial centers, geographical location, road density, and transit accessibility. We also find significant heterogeneity across neighborhood types: communities with a higher share of elderly residents show greater sensitivity to these moderating effects, particularly in terms of shopping trip frequency. Overall, the results suggest that e-shopping may reshape the foundations of proximity-based planning. Our study further demonstrates the value of mobile signaling data in capturing these emerging dynamics, offering new insights for modeling travel demand and informing land use policies in the digital era.</p>