The invention discloses a mobile phone signaling data-based urban transportation characteristic determining method, which comprises the steps of preprocessing mobile phone signaling data and quickly extracting an available field to form a storage format employing a user ID as a key field; sorting mobile positions of each user according to time and carrying out denoising according to a speed and angle exception judgment method; forming a convergence point by using a DBSCAN clustering algorithm, and identifying all stay points and stay time of each user every time; and classifying the stay points and calculating the urban traffic generation amount, the traffic attraction amount, the travel times, the average travel times, the travel distance, the commuting trip distance, the living index and the employment index. The urban traffic generation amount, the traffic attraction amount, the travel times, the average travel times, the travel distance, the commuting trip distance, the living index and the employment index are quickly and relatively accurately calculated by fully utilizing mobile phone signaling data, and data support is provided for urban transportation planning, traffic management and traffic strategy research.