Tweets on the Go: Gender Differences in Transport Perception and Its Discussion on Social Media

People often base their mobility decisions on subjective aspects of travel experience, such as time perception, space usage, and safety. It is well recognized that different groups within a population will react differently to the same trip, however, current data collection methods might not consider the multi dimensional aspects of travel perception, which could lead to overlooking the needs of large population groups. In this paper, we propose to measure several aspects of the travel experience from the social media platform Twitter, with a focus on differences with respect to gender. We analyzed more than 400,000 tweets from 100,000 users about transportation from Santiago, Chile. Our main findings show that both genders express themselves differently, as women write about their emotions regarding travel (both, positive and negative feelings), that men express themselves using slang, making it difficult to interpret emotion. The strongest difference is related to harassment, not only on transportation, but also on the public space. Since these aspects are usually omitted from travel surveys, our work provides evidence on how Twitter allows the measurement of aspects of the transportation system in a city that have been studied in qualitative terms, complementing surveys with emotional and safety aspects that are as relevant as those traditionally measured.