Revealing mobilities of people to understand cross-border regions: insights from Luxembourg using social media data

Figures & data

Figure 1. The conceptual framework of data collection and data enrichment using the activity space approach to reveal cross-border mobilities and its motives from an individual perspective.

Figure 2. The study area of Luxembourg situated within the official delineation of the Greater Region of Luxembourg, and our extended GRL definition used in this study.

Table 1. Description of used Twitter data.

	Users		Geolocated		Geolocated Tweets/user
	n	%	n	%
Initially collected dataset	66,752	100	28,005,408	100	420
Users who have visited Luxembourg (analysis input data)	21,659	32	10,776,151	38	498

Table 2. Description of movement data from Twitter users visiting Luxembourg by movement type.

	n	%
Movement starts and end in outside the GRL	4,161,075	58
Movement between the GRL and outside the GRL	298,482	4
Movement starts and end within the GRL, but does not cross a country border	2,701,672	37
Movement starts and end within the GRL and crosses a country border	61,167	1
Total	7,222,396	100
User count	19,964

Table 3. Distribution of Twitter users crossing borders of Luxembourg by their place of residence.

Place of residence		Twitter users (n)	Division of all users (%)	Division of users residing in the GRL (%)
The GRL	France	1,840	10	33
	Luxembourg	1,393	8	25
	Germany	640	4	11
	Belgium	371	2	7
	Cross-border commuter	1,339	8	24
Non-local		11,779	68
Total		17,362	100	100

Figure 3. The correlation between cross-border workers from official registry data (Statec 2021) and daily border crossers from Twitter data at municipality level, n = 72, (A), and kernel density (radius 10 km) estimation of commuters’ residential locations from Twitter data (B).

Table 4. Distribution of movements crossing Luxembourg’s borders by place of residence and border section with neighbouring country during the study period.

Place of residence		All movements	Movements by border section of Luxembourg (%)
			Belgian	French	German
The GRL	France	27	2	45	1
	Luxembourg	9	12	5	18
	Germany	5	1	0	21
	Belgium	4	17	0	0
	Cross-border commuter	40	46	42	29
Non-local		15	22	8	31
Total		100	100	100	100
n		49,671	9,567	29,514	10,590

Figure 4. Yearly division of cross-border mobility of Luxembourg that remain within the GRL by border crosser type (A), and the relative proportion of cross border mobility of daily commuters by border section of Luxembourg (B).

Figure 5. Monthly (A) and weekday (B) variations of mobility crossing the borders of Luxembourg from the average by border crosser type. Cross-border mobility is limited to movements that remain within the GRL.

Figure 6. Distribution of cross-border mobility distances by border crosser type (A), by the residence country of cross-commuters (B) and by the residence country of other local people residing within the GRL (C).

Figure 7. Difference between weekday median distance of cross-border trips compared to overall median distance of cross-border trips in case of border crosser type and all trips together.

Figure 8. The estimated geographical distribution of cross-border mobility flows crossing the borders of Luxembourg from Twitter data by cross-border commuters (A) and locals residing in Luxembourg (B), Belgium (C), France (D) and Germany (E). The proportional value indicates how many movements were located within the closest 3 km².

Statec. 2021. Labour market statistics.

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