When something goes wrong on transit, some riders automatically reach for their smart phones and share information — and frustration — via Twitter. They are less likely to comment when things go right. So when researchers at Purdue University (IN) tapped into Twitter to test the mood of Chicago commuters, they found that complaints outnumbered compliments. Using the market research tool of sentiment analysis, Craig Collins, Samiul Hasan, and Satish Ukkusuri collected tweets from Chicago Transit Authority (IL) riders and looked for patterns. Tweets were cleaned, sorted, analyzed, and ranked from negative (-5) to positive (+5). The analysis, which covered tweets from last summer (which was before CTA started tweeting), yielded 298 positive posts and 465 negative ones. The Atlantic Cities writes about Hasan’s presentation of these findings Tuesday at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting. Saying that the analysis showed limited positive sentiment, Hasan suggested that no news is good news. “The most interesting thing we found is that transit riders do not give any positive sentiment at a particular time. They only give negative sentiment,” he said. “But that’s not very disappointing because we found that the lack of negative sentiment is basically what transit authorities should look for. If there’s no negative sentiment at any given time, that means that things are running smoothly.” (Full disclosure: I was part of the same session, presenting the findings from my recently completed, but unpublished, TCRP synthesis on public transportation and social media.) Link to full story in The Atlantic Cities.
