Studying anonymized cell-phone data, researchers discovered what is known as an inverse square relation between the number of people in a given urban location and the distance they traveled to get there, as well as how frequently they made the trip. It may seem intuitive that people visit nearby locations frequently and distant ones less so, but the newly discovered relation puts the concept into specific numerical terms. It accurately predicts, for instance, that the number of people coming from two kilometers away five times per week will be the same as the number coming from five kilometers twice a week. The researchers’ new visitation law, and a versatile model of individuals’ movements within cities based on it, was reported in Nature.

“This is a super striking, robust result,” says Laura Alessandretti, a computational social scientist at the Technical University of Denmark, who was not involved in the study but co-wrote an accompanying commentary. “We tend to think that there are lots of contextual aspects that affect the way we move, such as the transportation system, the morphology of a given place, and socioeconomic aspects. This is true to some extent, but what this shows is that there are some robust laws that apply everywhere.”