Using Twitter to Gauge Customer Satisfaction Response to a Major Transit Service Change in Calgary, Canada

Measuring public opinion about the quality of transit services is a key factor in understanding and addressing customer dissatisfaction and increasing customer loyalty and ridership. Sentiment analysis using social media—in particular Twitter—is a relatively cheap and potentially powerful complement to traditional survey methods, which are expensive and limited in sample size. This study aims to evaluate customer response to the introduction of Calgary Transit’s MAX routes. We compared customer satisfaction expressed on Twitter with measured service reliability in the form of on-time performance. We also employed a qualitative research approach using content analysis from Twitter to gauge rider satisfaction over several service attributes before and after the service change. A transit-specific sentiment lexicon was developed to support this study using a hybrid approach. This lexicon outperformed generic sentiment lexicons traditionally used in transit studies with regard to both accuracy (18.4%) and F1-score (7.1%). We found that the overall perception of on-time performance from riders using Twitter was similar to the actual performance in the field. This was also observed for one individual route on which stops with poor schedule adherence were linked with negative feedback. This study concludes that combining customer-oriented measures from Twitter with operational-oriented ones would enable transit agencies to make better-informed decisions for planning and operational purposes.