Understanding the patterns of car travel

Are the patterns of car travel different from those of general human mobility? Based on a unique dataset consisting of the GPS trajectories of 10 million travels accomplished by 150,000 cars in Italy, we investigate how known mobility models apply to car travels, and illustrate novel analytical findings. We also assess to what extent the sample in our dataset is representative of the overall car mobility, and discover how to build an extremely accurate model that, given our GPS data, estimates the real traffic values as measured by road sensors