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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Parents’ perceptions regarding public transport and active modes influence the youth’s acceptance
and support for sustainable school commuting. Urban mobility surveys can gather such
insights by utilizing closed and open-ended questions. The latter, particularly, holds the potential
for nuanced expectations and insights from Public Transport (PT) users, often absent in closedended
responses. This paper proposes a methodology utilizing Latent Dirichlet Allocation
(LDA) to extract valuable information from open-ended survey responses, shedding light on
parents’ expectations regarding their children’s school commute via PT. Analyzing responses
from two surveys involving 448 households, with a focus on parents in the Lisbon Metro Area,
spanning the school years of 2017–2018 and 2018–2019, and pre-and post-field interventions,
our study employs LDA to assess households’ criticisms and recommendations for improving
public transport services. Our findings illustrate a shift from general criticisms in the initial survey
to proactive suggestions in the subsequent one, aligning with marketing efforts to foster more
sustainable school commuting with PT. Empirically, our study underscores LDA’s efficacy in
capturing users’ feedback often neglected by closed-ended questions. Effective preprocessing of
textual data facilitates streamlined field interventions. Overall, our contribution provides usercentered
insights to inform PT policymakers, promoting the incorporation of user-driven
enhancements.
Description
Keywords
Sustainable school commuting Open-ended survey responses Text mining Topic modeling Latent dirichlet allocation
Citation
Motta Queiroz, M., Roque, C., Moura, F., & Marôco, J. (2024). Understanding the expectations of parents regarding their children’s school commuting by public transport using latent Dirichlet Allocation. Transportation Research Part A, 181. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2024.103986
Publisher
Elsevier Ltd