Project Introduction

Our project aimed to explore a casual relationship between the sentiment of tweets of different types of transit and survey data collected by the transit agencies themselves. Initially, we predicted that Twitter data would be overwhelmingly negative. We believed this would be a result of individuals only tweeting about the negative experiences they had, and…

Methodology

Twitter Analysis In order to test our research question, we looked to Twitter as the most easily accessible form of social media to survey. To objectively analyze the “satisfaction” that each tweet expresses, we used a Sentiment Analysis platform called Vader. Sentiment Analysis ranks the tone of each tweet on a scale of -1 to…

AC Transit

Based on the Twitter data we scraped with the keyword AC Transit, it had a sentiment score of 0.208 on a scale of -1 to 1. While the score is still somewhat low, it is definitely leaning in the positive direction. This is score appears reasonable when comparing our data provided in “2008/2009 On-Board Rider…

BART

Out of the 3 transit agencies that we studied, BART consistently had the lowest satisfaction rating across most metrics. While this difference was not overwhelmingly dramatic, it was clear that there was a general dislike of the BART system, both regarding its general usage difficulty, overcrowding and overall reliability. While these were negative factors that…

Muni

Muni provides a network of buses, light rail trains, historic streetcars and cable cars in San Francisco. It serves both commuters and travelers, as San Francisco has many tourist attractions. Muni vehicles frequently delay, which failed to reach the agency’s target in . The amount of service delivery Muni can offer doesn’t match the increasing…

Conclusions

After analyzing Twitter data and survey data of AC Transit, BART, and Muni in the San Francisco Bay Area, we found that the sentiment analysis of tweets and the official survey done by transit agencies came to similar conclusions about passengers’ level of satisfaction with public transit, no matter for individual transit agency or for…