01629532

Component

https://doi.org/10.3141/2666-01

Understanding how travelers make mobility decisions has always been central to transportation studies. The growing availability of information and communication technologies in everyday life and their role in conveying more recent, relevant, and customized information have substantially changed the context within which trip decisions are made. Whether travelers are actively seeking pretrip information or merely surfing the web, they have access through social media to user-generated information that may affect their mobility decisions. This study forms an exploratory step in understanding how one such social media platform, Yelp.com, designed to allow users to review and rate their experiences at any visited business, can serve as an information source for activity and trip planning in the pretrip process. In particular, the study explored (a) the relative depth, (b) the sentiment associated with, and (c) the type of information in transport-related reviews on Yelp.com. This research has implications for the study of travel behavior in a highly connected environment and can inform efforts to design information and communication technology tools aimed at affecting behavior.

01648400

17-05732

English

0000-0002-8443-8928

pp 1–9

2017

Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board

9780309441926

Digital/other

Figures (5) ; Maps; References (27) ; Tables (7)

Activity choices; Data analysis; Decision making; Mobility; Reviews; Social media; Travel behavior

Yelp

Data and Information Technology; Planning and Forecasting; Transportation (General)

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 8 2016 12:18PM

• Analysis of Car Type Preferences Among Students Based on Seemingly Unrelated Regression
• Analysis of the Impact of Technology Use on Multimodality and Activity Travel Characteristics
• Built Environment and Walking to School: Findings from a Student Travel Behavior Survey in Massachusetts
• Changing Influence of Factors Explaining Household Car Ownership Levels in the Netherlands
• Digital Narratives of Place: Learning About Neighborhood Sense of Place and Travel Through Online Responses
• Exploring Daily Rhythms of Interpersonal Contacts: Time-of-Day Dynamics of Human Interactions with Latent Class Cluster Analysis
• Impacts of Telecommuting on Nonmandatory Activity Participation: Role of Endogeneity
• Inferring Activities from Social Media Data
• Modeling Week Activity Schedules for Travel Demand Models
• Personalization of Routing Services: User Classification as a Method to Overcome the Cold Start Problem for Personalized Models
• The Path of Least Resistance: Identifying Supporters of Public and Active Transportation Projects