Research Paper on Use of Social Media in Transport for London

Introduction

The growing demands of the 21st century include the need for an effective transport system that can serve the growing populations in the cities. London is one of the fastest growing cities and the people in it rely on the government to provide them with effective solutions o traffic challenges. The city has underground and over-ground railway systems, subways, roads and cycling paths that require effective logistical planning. Transport for London (TfL), a local government body, is responsible for the transport planning in Greater London, England and it helps in managing railway services, buses, rivers, taxis, and cyclists in the city. TfL also works with the national Department for Transport and other licensees to achieve its goals. TfL was created in 2000 through the Greater London Authority Act passed in 1999 and has helped the city to run its operations since then (Goulet-Langlois, Koutsopoulos and Zhao 2016). TfL uses social media tools to accomplish its missions and this has improved its delivery of services.

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Social Media & Tools Relevant to the Sector

Social media usage has increased over the years due to the increased use of technology and mobile gadgets. TfL uses that knowledge to increase its efficiency by using social media tools to reach out to their target consumers. For example, TfL runs 21 Twitter accounts meant to help their users in moving around the city. The accounts include @TfLTravelAlerts and @TfLBusAlerts and they both give updates and alerts about h transport status in the city. Twitter is one of the social media tools used by TfL to achieve its goals and to improve services delivery. TfL uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to collect information useful in effective transport planning (Mokashi, Okeke and Mohan, 2017). The data collected is analyzed and shared on social media to inform the users about the transport systems and the routes that are operational. TfL has used social media since 2009 and by 2012, it became one of the main sources of information used to improve their services. They use it to identify the pleasure and pain points, which refers to the areas where the users of the transport systems experience challenges and where they experience satisfaction. TfL uses external agencies to analyze the data collected from social media and to determine the parts that need improvements. The pain points are as shown in the table below for every 100,000 journeys.

Purpose and Activities

Social media provides quick and efficient ways to deal with the transport challenges in the transport systems. For example, it helped to identify the way people used alcohol and other drugs in the subways and the dangers it caused. The main purpose of the social media tools is to inform TfL on the routes that are congested and any other issues related to their operations. The data is used in conjunction with the cameras and street lights across the city to ensure the routes are free from traffic jams and accidents. The other tool is CX social, which is also used in McDonalds and O2. It helps them to handle a high level of traffic on social media accounts and to handle many accounts at the same time. CX social also helps TfL to categorize the messages to track the common message shared on the social media accounts (Kuffo, Vaca, Izquierdo and Bustamante, 2018). In that way, it is possible to understand the grievances raised by a large number of the users of the TfL service across London.

Adoption Issues

The adoption process of the TfL was faced by several challenges and one of them is resistance. Normally, people resist changes and they opt to retain their old systems for the fear of the unknowns (Ybema, Thomas and Hardy 2016). The other one was false alerts by malicious people and the other one was theft of cables and data from their systems. The limited resource was a major obstacle and poor connectivity also affected the delivery of their services. The business drivers include the increased population and earnings. Some of the opportunities include controlling the national railway system and air transport across the city.

Innovation Issues

The innovation in TfL guides on the ways to improve the services delivery in the future. The main areas where innovation is used to achieve the goals are the frontline operations and business planning. The human resources department seeks to employ people with IT knowledge that can be used to innovate new ways to carry out the operations of TfL. One of the innovation programmes is the London RoadLab and the other one is Mayor's Civic Innovation programme. The use of such disruptive innovation helps to create new ways to solve challenges and create new solutions to the existing challenges (Christensen, Raynor and McDonald 2015). TfL invites innovators who can help improve the efficiency of their services.

Impact Analysis

The impacts analysis shows that TfL has solved many of the challenges that used to affect the transport industry in the city. There is better coordination between the road users and TfL and this makes it possible to rectify the problems in the transport industry. The analysis also indicates the use of TfL has improved the efficiency of the system and more people can get to their destination faster than before. The other one is that TfL has improved the access to real-time availability of data through the use of big data (Stone and Aravopoulou, 2018). It is expected that in future, TfL will offer more services and it will be more efficient than today.

References

Christensen, C.M., Raynor, M.E. and McDonald, R., 2015. What is disruptive innovation? Harvard Business Review, 93(12), pp.44-53.

Goulet-Langlois, G., Koutsopoulos, H.N. and Zhao, J., 2016. Inferring patterns in the multi-week activity sequences of public transport users. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 64, pp.1-16.

Kuffo, L., Vaca, C., Izquierdo, E. and Bustamante, J.C., 2018, December. Know your customer: Detection of Customer Experience (CX) in Social Platforms using Text Categorization. In 2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data)(pp. 4086-4094). IEEE.

Mokashi, M.S., Okeke, P. and Mohan, U., 2017. Study on the Use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for Effective Transport Planning for Transport for London (TfL). In Proceedings of the International Conference on Data Engineering and Communication Technology (pp. 719-728). Springer, Singapore.

Stone, M., and Aravopoulou, E., 2018. Improving journeys by opening data: the case of transport for London (TfL). The Bottom Line, 31(1), pp.2-15.

Ybema, S., Thomas, R. and Hardy, C., 2016. Organizational change and resistance: An identity perspective. The SAGE handbook of resistance, pp.386-404.