What’s better than tweeting your complaints about the weather, or the traffic? That’s right, tweeting about both bad weather and horrible traffic! And, in fact, you shouldn’t be ashamed to do so, as scientists say it could help prevent road accidents and save lives!
Also Read: 10 Lessons I’ve Learned From 10,000 Tweets
So far, traffic models collect data from weather stations, road cameras, and sensors. However, they do not provide us with accurate prediction models, as they are static and they take samples at pre-defined timeframes.
Twitter, on the other hand, offers a vast array of hyperlocal data. Apart from that, our natural tendency to talk more about weather when it’s particularly bad, leaves space for the creation of a dynamic model which will take into account for the flow and the detail of the data provided by million Twitter users.
The scientific leads of this research at the University at Buffalo, claim that weather-related tweets could be successfully incorporated into existing traffic and statistical models, and help adapt traffic prediction with greater detail, thus helping to avoid accidents and possible collisions altogether! More specifically, through several trials, researchers proved that accuracy increased significantly when Twitter data was injected into the existing models.
So, now, with the power of science, we are all free to whine about the weather on Twitter!
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