Exploratory Study on Correlation Between Twitter Concentration and Traffic Surges

Social media receive increasing attention as a crowdsourced information resource in traffic operations and management. Tweets, which are blogged and shared by great masses of people, may be associated with some major social activities. In this study these tweets are called “Twitter concentrations.” The public activities behind Twitter concentrations potentially pose more pressure on the traffic network and cause traffic surges within a specified time and location. However, it is still unknown how closely the Twitter concentrations and traffic surges are correlated. This study fuses a set of tweets and traffic data collected during 2014 in Northern Virginia and investigates the correlation between Twitter concentrations and traffic surges in July. The results show the promise and effectiveness of the proposed methods and even provide insights into the causality of nonrecurrent traffic surges.