Fujimoto Yuki

In road management, it is necessary to detect diverse phenomena such as traffic accidents and congestion and take measures including traffic regulations flexibly. Road administrators have been monitoring road traffic conditions daily, for example, through cameras installed on the roads or by patrols. However, there is a possibility that they may not be able to grasp the conditions during large-scale disasters as such equipment may break down. As a measure to deal with the situation, there are cases in recent years that road administrators analyze real-time information related to traffic phenomena posted to SNS (social network services). The contents posted to SNS contain microbloggers' purposes of travel or thoughts and impressions that are hard to collect with the present monitoring methods or statistical survey. Based on this, if a measure to utilize highly reliable post contents is established, advancement of road management can be expected. In this study, a method for analyzing reliability of microbloggers by classifying them into four quadrants is devised using the number of SNS entries posted by road users regarding a specific road and habitual behavior that can be analyzed from their past posting tendencies. The result shows that the microbloggers who are judged as reliable by the proposed method have a tendency to post useful information related to traffic phenomena. Then potential for making good use of SNS in road management is discussed using the outcome of the proposed method.