Barriers to Social Media Use for Disasters within Transportation

Transportation is a critical sector within emergency and disaster response, and timely communication is necessary. Social media has gained popularity as both a means to communicate and to gather information during emergencies; however, it is rarely leveraged to any significant extent within transportation. Given that some social media platforms have billions of active monthly users, the issue of barriers to leveraging this data source within transportation has been raised and is addressed within this study. The primary objective is to identify the most significant barriers to social media use before, during, and after emergencies within transportation agencies. A state-of-the-art review of social media use within transportation is first presented, in which situational awareness, natural language processing, and image-based machine learning techniques have emerged with transportation applications. This is supplemented by a survey of transportation officials to gather insight into the current use of social media data and perceived barriers within emergency contexts. Policies, information accessibility, and a lack of specialized tools emerge as common threads that prevent further implementation of social media within transportation. Recommendations are provided for further research to expedite implementation and to positively impact disaster response.