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Highways and railways can be traced in a map using Twitter Data, according to IFISC (UIB-CSIC) researchers
"Tweets on the Road" is a mobility study done by researchers at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems, IFISC (CSIC / UIB) following geolocated tweets posted from the roads and railways of Europe between September 2012 and November 2013 . The work has been prepared by Maxime Lenormand, Antonia Tugores, Pere Colet and Jose Javier Ramasco, all researchers IFISC.
The pervasiveness of mobile devices, which is increasing daily, is generating a vast amount of geo-located data allowing us to gain further insights into human behaviors. In particular, this new technology enables users to communicate through mobile social media applications, such as Twitter, anytime and anywhere. Thus, geo-located tweets offer the possibility to carry out in-depth studies on human mobility. In this paper, we study the use of Twitter in transportation by identifying tweets posted from roads and rails in Europe between September 2012 and November 2013. We compute the percentage of highway and railway segments covered by tweets in 39 countries. The coverages are very different from country to country and their variability can be partially explained by differences in Twitter penetration rates. Still, some of these differences might be related to cultural factors regarding mobility habits and interacting socially online. Analyzing particular road sectors, our results show a positive correlation between the number of tweets on the road and the Average Annual Daily Traffic on highways in France and in the UK. Transport modality can be studied with these data as well, for which we discover very heterogeneous usage patterns across the continent.
In this work we have collected about 5 million geolocated tweets from 39 European countries, issued by about one and a half million users, with the aim of exploring the use of Twitter in transport networks.
Tweets on the Road was recently published in the journal PLoS ONE (PLoS ONE 9, @e105407, 2014).
You can consult the maps with the results of work in: http://ifisc.uib-csic.es/humanmobility/tweetsontheroad/
