  Given the rapid recent trend of urbanization, a better understanding of how
urban infrastructure mediates socioeconomic interactions and economic systems
is of vital importance. While the accessibility of location-enabled devices as
well as large-scale datasets of human activities, has fueled significant
advances in our understanding, there is little agreement on the linkage between
socioeconomic status and its influence on movement patterns, in particular, the
role of inequality. Here, we analyze a heavily aggregated and anonymized
summary of global mobility and investigate the relationships between
socioeconomic status and mobility across a hundred cities in the US and Brazil.
We uncover two types of relationships, finding either a clear connection or
little-to-no interdependencies. The former tend to be characterized by low
levels of public transportation usage, inequitable access to basic amenities
and services, and segregated clusters of communities in terms of income, with
the latter class showing the opposite trends. Our findings provide useful
lessons in designing urban habitats that serve the larger interests of all
inhabitants irrespective of their economic status.
