Social media data now enriches and supplements information flow in various sectors of society. The question addressed here is whether social media can act as a credible information source of sufficient quality to meet the needs of transport planners, operators, policy makers and the travelling public. A typology of primary transport data needs, current and new data sources is initially established, following which this study focuses on social media textual data in particular. Three sub‐questions are investigated: the potential to use social media data alongside existing transport data, the technical challenges in extracting transport‐relevant information from social media and the wider barriers to the uptake of this data. Following an overview of the text mining process to extract relevant information from the corpus, a review of the challenges this approach holds for the transport sector is given. These include ontologies, sentiment analysis, location names and measuring accuracy. Finally, institutional issues in the greater use of social media are highlighted, concluding that social media information has not yet been fully explored. The contribution of this study is in scoping the technical challenges in mining social media data within the transport context, laying the foundation for further research in this field.

Policy-makers have recognized that changing travel behavior is important. People, however, do not change their behavior so readily, particularly the use of the car. A central concept that has been invoked to account for this has been the concept of habit. However, various studies also present people as having concrete reasons for driving: Their choices are intentional. This interdisciplinary study attempts to reconcile these two understandings of travel behavior by drawing on insights from the philosopher Anscombe and a growing body of travel research termed the mobility biography literature. It applies some of Anscombe’s insights from Intention to the act of driving. With regard to the mobility biography literature, it draws out conceptual implications both from theoretical and empirical aspects: In particular, the characterization of travel decisions as nested in a hierarchy of life decisions and the association of life events with changes in travel decisions. It concludes that a broader conceptualization of human behavior leads to a broader view as to what policy-makers can do. It reminds us that transport is ‘special’, that transport and policy are inextricable, and that the importance of infrastructure provision should not be ignored.

E-scooters are a relatively new mode of travel in the UK and their impacts on physical and mental health are uncertain. Although their use does not involve physical activity directly, through walking or cycling, they might provide other well-being benefits. Such effects will likely vary according to the user and the context. We aim to assess whether use of shared e-scooters is associated with wider well-being and mental health, arising for example from for example access to local services, exposure to the natural environment, reduced stress, and a perception of having done some exercise. Our secondary question is whether potential well-being impacts vary across population sub-groups. A total of 2,402 responses to an online survey completed during a one-month period (August to September 2021) by shared e-scooters users operated by a sole UK provider. Personal well-being from e-scooter use was assessed using questions on general levels of stress and mood (before, during or after e-scooter journeys), and features of the journey such as exposure to the natural environment and perception of air quality. All well-being questions were reported using a five-point Likert scale. Analysis indicates that people with protected characteristics and those who have personal challenges, for example with respect to personal mobility, are more likely to incur well-being benefits. The results presented are part of on-going research, with the next steps being to measure changes over time. The findings may be of interest to policymakers and the research community.

In many countries, governments have implemented non-pharmaceutical techniques to limit COVID-19 transmission. Restricting human mobility is one of the most common interventions, including lockdown, travel restrictions, working from home, etc. However, due to the strong transmission ability of the virus variants, further rounds of interventions, including a strict lockdown, are not considered as effective as expected. The paper aims to understand how the lockdown policy and pandemics changed human mobility in the real scenario. Here we focus on understanding the mobility changes caused by compliance with restrictions and risk perceptions, using a mobility index from the Google report during three strict lockdown periods in Leeds, the largest city in the county of West Yorkshire, England, from March 2020 to March 2021. The research uses time-varying z-scores and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to simulate how local people dynamically process and perceive health risks based on multi-dimensional daily COVID-19 reports first. Further modelling highlights exponentially increasing policy non-compliance through the duration of lockdown, probably attributable to factors such as mental anxiety and economic pressures. Finally, the proposed nonlinear regression model examines the mobility changes caused by the population’s dynamic risk perceptions and lockdown duration. The case study model in Leeds shows a good fit to the empirical mobility data and indicates that the third lockdown policy took effect much slower than the first. At the same time, the negative impact of the epidemic on population mobility decayed by 40% in the third lockdown period in contrast with the first lockdown. The risk perception estimation methods could reflect that the local population became increasingly accustomed to the COVID-19 situation, and local people rationally evaluated the risks of COVID in the third lockdown period. The results demonstrate that simulated risk perceptions and policy decay could explain urban mobility behaviour during lockdown periods, which could be a reference for future decision-making processes.

A sustainable information and communication flow (ICF) supports lifelines in floods, especially transport systems. A detailed insight into barriers regarding effective ICF through the implementation of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the lifecycle of floods was given for evolved and evolving economies, i.e., York and Head-Marala, with sample sizes of 240 and 300 experts, respectively. All experts responded on an ethically approved questionnaire with further information notes that were used whilst discoursing the factors. ICTs were segregated into two groups, ranging from simple to advanced technologies. KMO and Bartlett’s tests confirmed high sampling adequacy with values ranging from 0.679 to 0.823 (≥0.5) with p-values ≤ 0.05. An amended version of Q-Methodology was used to identify nine factors in total. Each factor with an Eigenvalue ≥1 was retained, and all factors were highly reliable with values between 0.89 and 0.96. Factors were explained through communalities, factor loadings, pattern and structure matrices, and notes from experts. Results showed that under-evolved economies have limited technological resources and under-developed flood coping plans compared to evolved economies. Also, the unacknowledged possibility was uncovered that ICF can certainly be sustained if all possibly available ICTs are engaged through a thorough deployment plan of action. Authorities needed to make ICT engagement plans simple and efficient through effective coordination among different institutions. Though authorities were trained and equipped with modern tools, equipment, and technologies, dense and dependent populations overwhelmed the rescue capabilities. Other than VMS, social media pages, and radio, other ICTs were not tried and tested in floods for the exchange of transport–flood ICF. These findings are useful for stakeholders from all communities, transport planning institutions, and flood managers who are not fully benefiting from the extended use of ICTs to manage travel activities in floods.