Using twitter to investigate responses to street reallocation during COVID-19: Findings from the U.S. and Canada.

Autor: Shirgaokar M; Urban and Regional Planning, College of Architecture and Planning, University of Colorado Denver, Campus Box 126, PO Box 173364, Denver, CO 80217-3364, USA., Reynard D; Human Geography and Planning, 1-26 Earth Sciences Building, University of Alberta, Edmonton AB T6G 2E3, Canada., Collins D; Human Geography and Planning, 1-26 Earth Sciences Building, University of Alberta, Edmonton AB T6G 2E3, Canada.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Transportation research. Part A, Policy and practice [Transp Res Part A Policy Pract] 2021 Dec; Vol. 154, pp. 300-312. Date of Electronic Publication: 2021 Oct 22.
DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2021.10.013
Abstrakt: The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged and encouraged local governments to reallocate street space. The chief purpose of new regimes of street management is to expand spaces for walking and bicycling, and to ease business interactions such as curbside pickup and dining while maintaining social distancing guidelines. We investigated how North Americans on Twitter viewed alternative uses and forms of street reallocation, specifically during the early months of the pandemic from April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2020. Relying on a crowdsourced dataset of government actions (Combs and Pardo 2021), we identified five areas of policy initiative that were broadly representative of government actions: cycling, walking, driving, business, and curbside. First, we identified a corpus of 292,108 geolocated tweets from the U.S. and Canada. Next, we used word vectors, built on this Twitter corpus, to generate similarity scores across the five areas of policy initiative for each tweet. Finally, we selected the top tweets that closely matched ideas contained in the areas of policy initiative, thus creating a finer corpus of 1,537 tweets. Using the five categories as guideposts, we conducted an inductive content analysis to understand opinions expressed on Twitter. Our analysis suggests that renewed use of the curb has opened up possibilities for reimaging this space. Particularly, business uses of the curb for dining and pick up zones have expanded widely, and there is more use of sidewalks; yet both spaces have limited capacity. Planners need to think of expanding these assets while reducing cost burdens for their alternative uses.
Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Crown Copyright © 2021 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
Externí odkaz: