Does the ADA Work? A Social Media Data-Driven Investigation of Disability-Related Inequity at Airports
Publication: Computing in Civil Engineering 2023
ABSTRACT
Out of the estimated 926 million Americans that use airports as their transportation systems, 27 million of them have a disability. People with disabilities face many barriers in the built environment, especially within public transportation (e.g., airports, train stations, bus terminals). This study applies unique text mining techniques to discover the topics that travelers with disabilities experienced. We collected and analyzed 553,430 reviews for 67 international airports across the United States to find the possible inequity issues involving passengers with disabilities. As online reviews are typically shorter in nature than other forms of social media, a unique short text clustering method (a collapsed Gibbs sampling algorithm for the Dirichlet multinomial mixture model, GSDMM) was used to identify 10 topics through 3,516 unique nouns. Our results showed that topics involving restrooms and intra-airport navigation score lower for travelers with disabilities than with all travelers. Our approach and findings can be used practically to identify concerns for designers and airport operational entities to find potential concerns to mitigate the inequity issues of passengers with disability.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this chapter.
REFERENCES
Bureau of Transportation Statistics. 2020. Preliminary Estimated Full Year 2019 and December 2019 U.S. Airline Traffic Data. Washington: United States Department of Transportation.
Chester, M., and C. Hendrickson. 2005. “Cost Impacts, Scheduling Impacts, and the Claims Process during Construction.” Journal of Construction Engineering and Management 131 (1): 102–107.
Civil Aviation Authority. 2015. Consumer Research for the UK aviation sector. London: Civil Aviation Authority.
FAA (Federal Aviation Administration). 2022. CY 2021 Enplanements at All Commercial Service Airports. September 16. https://www.faa.gov/airports/planning_capacity/passenger_allcargo_stats/passenger/cy21_commercial_service_enplanements.
GAO (Government Accountibility Office). 2022. Passengers with Disabilities Barriers to Accessible Air Travel Remain. Washington DC: United States Government Accountability Office.
Gitto, S., and P. Manusco. 2017. “Improving airport services using sentiment analysis of the websites.” Tourism Management Perspectives 22: 132–136.
Lucini, F. R., L. M. Tonetto, F. S. Fogliatto, and M. J. Anzanello. 2020. “Text mining approach to explore dimensions of airline customer satisfaction using online customer reviews.” Journal of Air Transport Management 83 (101760).
Major, W. L., and S. M. Hubbard. 2019. “An examination of disability-related complaints in the United States commercial aviation sector.” Journal of Air Transportation Management 43–53.
Park, J.-W., R. Robertson, and C.-L. Wu. 2006. “The Effects of Individual Dimensions of Airline Service Quality: Findings From Australian Domestic Air Passengers.” Journal of Hospitality and Tourism 13 (2): 161–176.
Park, J. Y., E. Mistur, D. Kim, Y. Mo, and R. Hoefer. 2022. “Toward human-centric urban infrastructure: Text mining for social media data to identify the public perception of COVID-19 policy in transportation hubs.” Sustainable Cities and Society 76 (1): 103524.
Yin, J., and J. Wang. 2014. “A Dirichlet Multinomial Mixture Model-based Approach for Short Text Clustering.” KDD '14: Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining. New York. 233–242.
Yoo, K. H., and U. Gretzel. 2008. “What Motivates Consumers to Write Online Travel Reviews?. " Information Technology & Tourism 10 (4): 283–295.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Computing in Civil Engineering 2023
Pages: 68 - 76
History
Published online: Jan 25, 2024
ASCE Technical Topics:
- Air transportation
- Airports and airfields
- Building design
- Buildings
- Bus stops
- Business management
- Design (by type)
- Engineering fundamentals
- Infrastructure
- Passengers
- People with disabilities
- Practice and Profession
- Public transportation
- Railroad stations
- Social factors
- Structural engineering
- Structures (by type)
- Terminal facilities
- Transportation engineering
- Transportation management
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.