Reducing Incident-Induced Emissions and Energy Use in Transportation: Use of Social Media Feeds as an Incident Management Support Tool
-
2018-01-01
-
Details:
-
Creators:
-
Corporate Creators:
-
Corporate Contributors:
-
Subject/TRT Terms:
-
Publication/ Report Number:
-
Resource Type:
-
Geographical Coverage:
-
Edition:Final Report, 8/2015-6/2017
-
Corporate Publisher:
-
Abstract:Ubiquitous connected devices and microblogging platforms, such as Twitter, are providing a huge amount user-generated information that has a great potential for applications in transportation incident management (TIM) with minimal infrastructure required. In this study publicly posted Twitter posts were gathered using relevant keywords. While organizational Twitter accounts (e.g., DOT, news outlets) disseminate traffic information after an incident is reported and confirmed, tweets of personal accounts are more likely to contain previously unreported traffic information, and therefore are particularly valuable for TIM. A variety of information such as location, time, severity, extent of damage, presence of debris, and evolution of congestion can be extracted from the Twitter’s text. Such information is especially useful for TIM as the traditional sources for gathering traffic information, such as loop detectors and sensors, are expensive to construct and maintain for local and rural roads. Accident delay as well as emissions and fuel consumption were calculated using comprehensive incident data from California Highway Patrol to demonstrate the benefits of using Twitter for TIM. As a result of the early detection, 4,046 vehicle-hours of delay savings, reduction in 5.9 kg of ROG, 133 kg of CO, 16.3 kg of NOx and 0.3 kg of PM 2.5 and 1,939 gal of gasoline and 622 gal of diesel were estimated to be saved – total monetary value of $75,600 i.e., $0.5 per mile per week in California. For incidents in NYS, for each accident recorded, accident delay as well as emissions and fuel consumption were estimated in order to benchmark the potential delay and savings due to early incident detection. The study concludes with recommendations for the application of social media for TIM.
-
Format:
-
Funding:
-
Collection(s):
-
Main Document Checksum:
-
Download URL:
-
File Type: