01660923

Component

n the 2010s, there has been a scholarly debate regarding the decrease in automobile-related mobility indicators (car ownership, driving license holding, VMT, etc.). Broadly speaking, two theories have been put forward to explain this trend: 1) economic factors whose impacts are well understood in principle, but whose occurrence among young adults as a demographic subgroup had been overlooked, and 2) less well-understood shifts in cultural mores, values and sentiment towards the automobile. This second theory is devilishly difficult to study, due primarily to limitations in standard data resources such as the National Household Travel Survey. In this study the authors first compiled a database of lyrics to top-40 popular music songs from 1956 to 2015, and subsequently identified references to automobiles within this corpus. The authors then evaluated whether there is support for theory #2 above within popular music, by looking at changes from the 1950s to the 2010s. The authors demonstrate that the frequency of references to automobility has increased over time, however the authors' results are mixed as to whether the references are becoming increasingly positive or negative (machine analysis suggests increasing negativity, while human analysis suggests increasing positivity).

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADD20 Standing Committee on Social and Economic Factors of Transportation.

18-06743

English

18p

2018

Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Automobile travel; Automobiles; Culture (Social sciences); Music; Trend (Statistics)

Natural language processing (Computer science)

Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Society

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2018 Paper #18-06743

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 8 2018 11:44AM