Tag Archives: sarah

News at the Rudin Center

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The NYU Rudin Center staff has been busy:

Rudin Center Director Mitchell Moss discussed the making of Hipsturbia and organic dry cleaners as indicators of gentrification in The New York Times.

Research Associate Sarah Kaufman will present the Rudin Center’s report on Superstorm Sandy at the Transportation Equity Conference in Albany on March 4th.

Research Assistant Carson Qing‘s study of Williamsburg’s late night rush hour has been featured in the Brooklyn Paper and The L Magazine. His newest post on location of employment in major U.S. is now on the blog.

We’re proud to bring on Anthony Townsend as Senior Research Fellow. Here’s a look at the work he’ll be doing at the Rudin Center:

Anthony Townsend is organizing several upcoming workshops that will further the Rudin Center’s investigations into emerging areas of transportation policy, planning and management – resilient regional transportation infrastructure for the Northeast Corridor, future tools and techniques for studying bicycle ownership and use in New York City, the role of big data and pedestrians, and future mobility systems in digitally-connected cities. Through his affiliation with the Silicon Valley-based Institute for the Future, Anthony is conducting a year-long forecast on the future of makers and small-scale manufacturing in cities around the world. His first book, SMART CITIES: Big Data, Civic Hackers and the Quest for a New Utopia will be published in October 2013 by W.W. Norton & Co.

 

Finally, some of our research staff attended the State of the City address at Barclays Center. Here’s a photo:

 

Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for regular updates.

Social Media in Disasters: TRB presentation

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We’ve posted Sarah Kaufman’s presentation on “Social Media in Disaster Preparation, Response and Recovery” from the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting on Slideshare. View below:

We’ll have a report on the same topic coming out in the next couple of months; please let us know if you have experiences to share on this subject.
Photo: Leah Flax

Policy by the Numbers

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NYU Rudin’s Sarah Kaufman has posted on Google’s Policy by the Numbers blog about social media and transportation, and the importance of saying you’re sorry. Check out the full post here, or read this excerpt below:

…a large portion of responsiveness is accountability. In our analysis, we found a major discrepancy in the use of “thanks” and “sorry” in the Twitter feeds of private transportation providers (specifically, American Airlines and JetBlue) versus public agencies. Specifically, the airlines apologized far more than public transportation providers for delays and cancellations: in the two months studied, American Airlines wrote “sorry” and its synonyms 3,949 times; PATH, 62 times; Metro-North, 39 times; NJ Transit, 25 times; and the others, three or fewer times. Similarly, while customer engagement dominated both airlines’ Twitter accounts (85% on average), demonstrating their need to be constantly responsive to and direct with customers, public transportation providers communicated less directly with their customers (34%). These patterns indicate a universal orientation toward customer service throughout the private companies, which must earn and maintain customer loyalty. However, public transportation providers, which often have a monopoly on customers, likely do not feel the same need to focus on them.

The entire social media report is available in Part 1 (Twitter use analysis) and Part 2 (Policy recommendations).

The Importance of Twitter to Transportation

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NYU Rudin Center researcher Sarah M. Kaufman gives an early look at her forthcoming research on social media use and transportation today on Google’s Policy By The Numbers Blog. Here’s a snippet from the piece; read it in its entirety on the blog:

Social media tools, such as Twitter, allow transportation providers to  communicate directly with users: alert customers about  service changes, suggest alternative routes, and amplify the message to friends and neighbors. Ideally, these actions would occur within moments of a delay’ Twitter is superb platform, since it is free, fast and packed with dynamic features.

 

But our research at NYU’s Rudin Center indicates that transportation providers in the New York Metropolitan region have yet to use Twitter to its fullest potential. Our research, based on all tweets from May 1 to June 30, 2012, offers policy recommendations for using Twitter in a transportation setting.

 

How do you use social media for transportation? Let us know in the comments.