Utilizing Social Media in Transport Planning and Public Transit Quality: Survey of Literature

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to examine whether mining and analyzing social media data can be a powerful tool in the transportation domain. A survey of the literature based on the existing uses of social media in transportation is conducted; opportunities and barriers are also presented for the subject. Analysis of social media can provide valuable information regarding incident detection, mobility, and activity patterns as well as users’ opinions about different transport modes. The issues that need to be addressed are not few, with most important ones being the advanced mining and linguistic techniques required for the extraction of information, the reliability of the data collected, and the sample bias. The study concludes with recommendations in relation to the existing gaps in the literature, such as the need to create a transport-oriented lexicon to facilitate the process of collecting transport-related information from social media, use of social media during transport planning and operation, and finally, potential use of qualitative indicators on public transportation issues regarding the perceived level of service.