Use of Social Media and Open Data for Mobility Services in Tampere

Urban Traffic Management Centres (TMCs) are in need of accurate information on traffic status to support drivers and keep traffic flowing in the city. A wide range of data from vehicles and infrastructure is available, such as floating car data, traffic cameras, loop detectors at traffic lights and social media. The Integrated Urban Mobility pilot from the TransformingTransport EU project demonstrates the potential of automated processing of these big data sources to improve situational awareness and to provide information to travellers. Twitter is used both for collecting traffic-related tweets for TMC operators and for informing drivers on events in the city. It also presents results from automated classification of traffic camera images using a deep learning neural network, in order to prioritize camera feeds for the TMC personnel to turn to. Through automatically generated twitter messages drivers can be informed in real-time and TMC operator workload can be reduced.