Transport Policy: Social Media and User-Generated Content in a Changing Information Paradigm

Rapid and recent developments in social media networks are providing a vision amongst transport suppliers, governments and academia of ‘next-generation’ information channels. This chapter identifies the main requirements for a social media information harvesting methodology in the transport context and highlights the challenges involved. Three questions are addressed concerning (1) The ways in which social media data can be used alongside or potentially instead of current transport data sources, (2) The technical challenges in text mining social media that create difficulties in generating high quality data for the transport sector and finally, (3) Whether there are wider institutional barriers in harnessing the potential of social media data for the transport sector. The chapter demonstrates that information harvested from social media can complement, enrich (or even replace) traditional data collection. Whilst further research is needed to develop automatic or semi-automatic methodologies for harvesting and analysing transport-related social media information, new skills are also needed in the sector to maximise the benefits of this new information source.