Twilytics: A Social Perception Analysis of Public Transit Systems during the COVID-19 Pandemic

In the United States, public transit ridership in 2020 declined by 79% compared to 2019 levels. With lockdowns implemented during the early days of the pandemic, direct human-to-human interactions migrated to virtual platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit). Social media platforms have aided researchers in answering numerous questions about current societal dilemmas, including COVID-19. This study investigates the public’s perception of transit systems via a social media analysis given the emergence of vaccines and other COVID-19 preventive measures. We developed a structured transportation tweet analytics framework (Twilytics) to analyze public discourse data (i.e., tweets from 2020 to 2021) on the impact of COVID-19 on transit systems. The framework has four main components. First, we extracted tweets between June 2020 to November 2021 from carefully curated keywords addressing transit services. Second, we pre-processed the data with data cleaning and feature engineering methods. Third, we performed descriptive and statistical analysis on the cleaned data. We hypothesized that the daily and monthly tweets related to transit systems will be significantly different. Lastly, we performed topic modeling to uncover the prominent themes of the public’s perception of transit systems during the pandemic. Overall, we extracted 44,320 tweets related to public transit in the US within the study period. Our results revealed that, on average, from June 2020 to November 2021, July (103) and Tuesdays (91) had the highest transit-related tweets. Kruskal-Wallis’s analysis of variance test results showed a statistically significant difference (p < 0.05) in the number of transit-related tweets per month and day. The topic modeling findings revealed themes of fear and confusion concerning the use of public transportation during the pandemic. Second, the public had doubts regarding the vaccines’ impact on transportation and movement throughout 2021, with most users concerned about the proliferation of new variants. Lastly, Twitter users were concerned about the travel bans placed on African countries amidst the Omicron variant and urged the government to remove the bans. These findings will help bridge the gap between public health, transport, and commuter needs by helping transportation authorities and city planners better understand the social perception of transit systems during a pandemic.