Netnography Study to Investigate End Users’ Satisfaction with Public Transport in UPPER Project’s Living Labs
The paper titled "Netnography Study to Investigate End Users’ Satisfaction with Public Transport in UPPER Project’s Living Labs," authored by UPPER partners Carol Soriano, Amparo López-Vicente, Juan F. Giménez, Raquel Marzo, José Solaz, and Elisa Signes from the Valencia Instituto de Biomecánica (IBV), was presented at the TRA Conference 2024 in Dublin and has now been published.
This study introduces a groundbreaking methodology that enhances—and in some cases may replace—traditional user surveys.
By applying netnography and social listening to analyze public social media posts from five European cities, the study captures authentic, unsolicited feedback from citizens. This approach provides nuanced, real-time insights into user satisfaction and expectations, making it a powerful tool for improving public transport systems. Most importantly, it enhances inclusivity by surfacing the voices of communities often excluded from conventional data collection.
“This approach doesn't replace surveys across the board, but in contexts like this one, it clearly complements—and can even substitute—them by offering more organic, real-time feedback.” IBV Carol Soriano
As part of the qualitative user research, this paper presents a Netnography study, performed to investigate the citizens' satisfaction with different transport modes, in five cities that are part of the 5 Living Labs of the UPPER project: València, Île-de-France, Rome, Oslo, and Mannheim.
More than fifteen thousand comments and reviews have been collected from sources like TripAdvisor, Google Reviews and Twitter, to assess six different transport modes: shared bike, bus, tram&subway, taxi, shared LEV, and shared car. The comments have been analysed employing natural language algorithms, which allowed us to extract the sentiment polarity (positive, negative, neutral), and the emotions (anger, joy, sadness), including the hate level. The results are presented aggregated per transport mode for all the cities, showing differences in the way citizens perceive and are satisfied with the communal transport modes, and the individual and shared transport modes. The results also present the differences in the topics per gender.
This study shows that public transportation use declined during the pandemic, with a noticeable recovery starting in 2022. A strong negative correlation (-0.88) exists between rising customer reviews, indicating increased use, and decreasing average ratings, reflecting declining satisfaction levels from 2015 to 2022, dropping from an average rating of 3.8 to 3. In terms of satisfaction, an analysis of all transportation modes across five cities yields an average rating of 3.2 out of 5.
Download the study here
