Photos, Tweets, and Trails: Are Social Media Proxies for Urban Trail Use?
Decision-makers need information on the use of, and demand for, public recreation and transportation facilities. Innovations in monitoring technologies and diffusion of social media enable new approaches to estimation of demand. The authors assess the feasibility of using geo-tagged photographs uploaded to the image-sharing website Flickr and Tweets from Twitter as proxy measures for urban trail use. The authors summarize geo-tagged Flickr uploads and Tweets along 80 one-mile segments of the multiuse trail network in Minneapolis, Minnesota and correlate results with previously published estimates of annual average daily trail traffic. Although heat maps of Flickr images and Tweets show some similarities with maps of variation in trail traffic, the correlation between photographs and trail traffic is moderately-weak (0.43), and there is no meaningful statistical correlation between Tweets and trail traffic. Use of a simple log-log bivariate regression to estimate trail traffic from photographs results in relatively high error. The predictor variables included in a published demand models for the same trails explain roughly the same amount of variation in photo-derived use, but some of the neighborhood socio-demographic and built environment independent variables have different effects. These results differ from previously published results that indicate social media may useful in assessing relative demand for recreational destinations. This difference may be because urban trails are used for multiple purposes, including routine commuting and shopping, and that trail users are less inclined to use social media on trips for these purposes. Social media have limitations as proxies for demand for urban trails.
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Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABJ30 Standing Committee on Urban Transportation Data and Information Systems.
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Corporate Authors:
500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC United States 20001 -
Authors:
- Wu, Xinyi
- Wood, Spencer A
- Fisher, David
- Lindsey, Greg
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Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
- Date: 2017
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Digital/other
- Features: Figures; Tables;
- Pagination: 16p
- Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Correlation analysis; Social media; Traffic forecasting; Trails; Travel demand management; Urban areas
- Identifier Terms: Twitter
- Geographic Terms: Minneapolis (Minnesota)
- Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01622562
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: 17-01957
- Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
- Created Date: Jan 17 2017 9:47AM