Earlier this year I touched on a new study that had explored the role Twitter could play in urban planning.  It involved monitoring the social network for tweets around the night time activity of citizens.

“You can capture information on urban land use more efficiently and for a much larger number of people than with questionnaires. Moreover, this type of consultation, traditionally used until now in planning activities, are very costly and can cause problems due to the lack of accuracy of the answers,” the authors said.

They hoped it would be particularly relevant for understanding our nocturnal movements as these were often omitted from planning procedures, despite the obvious issues involved in our night time activities.

A recent study might well be offering similar insights into the way we travel.The paper saw 64,000 tweets about public transportation analyzed.  Alongside these messages, a number of tweets made by celebrities were included to help provide a scale of positivity.  The scale had the likes of William Shatner at the positive end, and Osama bin Laden at the negative end.The data revealed that there was a distinct level of hostility aimed at the likes of the DC Metro in Washington, whilst the Vancouver Translink system came out on top.

Interestingly, and rather sadly, it seems that many Twitter users were taking to the social network to post derogatory and even discriminatory comments about fellow passengers.

“Negative and racist comments about transit patrons are a larger part of the negative comments about transit, much more so than parks, airlines or other services,” the authors say. “Otherwise, commenters appear on balance to say equally happy and unhappy things about public transit and airline service.”

Whilst that’s not good, a correlation did emerge between the activity levels of providers and the level of negativity posted on the network.  The Vancouver system were actively engaging with passengers, which the authors believe contribute to their positive overall response.

A similar study was recently undertaken in the UK, with Commute London finding that around 280,000 travel related tweets were sent to travel companies each year, with a grand total of around 1.8 million tweets about commuting.

Commute London director Daren Wood said: “Social media sites like Twitter provide commuters with an open forum to make complaints, provide feedback and make themselves heard by others.

“Our analysis shows that the train companies need to make much better use of their Twitter feeds if they wish to keep customers happy by listening and learning from criticism.”

Of course, while this is interesting and all, it doesn’t really use social data in a very meaningful sense.  We’ve seen a number of projects that have used data from our mobile phones to try and improve traffic management, and despite Twitter data being used to predict everything from movie success to flu, it seems we might have to wait a little longer before we can map transit patterns with the help of our tweets.