Confirming the Third Law of Geography: Evidence in China’s Spring Festival Travel Rush

Abstract

The Third Law of Geography had been proposed by researchers for several years, yet empirical evidence within the field of human geography remained scarce. This study focused on the tidal characteristics of China's Spring Festival Travel Rush (Chunyun) across 365 cities in 2019, utilizing day-by-day time-series big data. It confirmed the presence and validity of the law, which posited that the more similar geographic configurations of two cities, the more similar the tidal features of human mobility between these two cities. Results showed that the logistic regression model had acceptable goodness of fit (0.421) and impacts of related indexes (city scale, labor supply, city level, traffic hub features, and dominant flow) had a statistically significant performance. Our research not only bolsters the use of data-driven policy decisions based on large-scale human mobility data but also offers a novel perspective to enhance the study of this law, serving as a pioneering effort to advance previous work.