Identification of (near) Real-time Traffic Congestion in the Cities of Australia through Twitter

Abstract

Transport congestion is an increasing problem especially for larger cities. Typically traffic conditions are monitored in Australia by state and/or federal authorities using expensive electronic devices/sensors on roads or through CCTV cameras. However there is an alternative and far cheaper way to monitor real-time traffic status on roads: through targeted social media analytics. Social networking sites such as Twitter are hugely popular, public and often real-time in nature. A growing number of people post tweets about their lives and feelings every day and everywhere, often with location-based service information included. In this paper, we present an architecture and novel harvesting and..