Leveraging Social Media Data to Identify Factors Influencing Public Attitude Towards Accessibility, Socioeconomic Disparity and Public Transportation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a social media-based method using NLP and data fusion to analyze public perceptions of transportation and socioeconomic issues, providing insights into demographic differences and disparities.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach leveraging social media data and advanced text analysis to understand transportation perceptions, bypassing traditional survey limitations.

Findings

Women and Asians discuss transportation more frequently.

Disadvantaged groups tend to communicate less about accessibility.

Air pollution correlates with more negative discussions on socioeconomic disparity.

Abstract

This study proposes a novel method to understand the factors affecting individuals' perception of transport accessibility, socioeconomic disparity, and public infrastructure. As opposed to the time consuming and expensive survey-based approach, this method can generate organic large-scale responses from social media and develop statistical models to understand individuals' perceptions of various transportation issues. This study retrieved and analyzed 36,098 tweets from New York City from March 19, 2020, to May 15, 2022. A state-of-the-art natural language processing algorithm is used for text mining and classification. A data fusion technique has been adopted to generate a series of socioeconomic traits that are used as explanatory variables in the model. The model results show that females and individuals of Asian origin tend to discuss transportation accessibility more than their counterparts, with those experiencing high neighborhood traffic also being more vocal. However, disadvantaged individuals, including the unemployed and those living in low-income neighborhoods or in areas with high natural hazard risks, tend to communicate less about such issues. As for socioeconomic disparity, individuals of Asian origin and those experiencing various types of air pollution are more likely to discuss these topics on Twitter, often with a negative sentiment. However, unemployed, or disadvantaged individuals, as well as those living in areas with high natural hazard risks or expected losses, are less inclined to tweet about this subject. Lack of internet accessibility could be a reason why many disadvantaged individuals do not tweet about transport accessibility and subsidized internet could be a possible solution.