Could Twitter help urban planners improve transport networks?

As far as data analysis is concerned, Twitter is primarily used for retrospective tracking of sentiment and other social data, but could geolocated Tweets be used to plan for the future? Data-mapping work by Eric Fischer suggests that it could. If the volume of geo-tagged Tweets is used a proxy for traffic levels, urban planners could use this data to fine-tune existing transport networks and establish where new routes are needed. Fischer took millions of geolocated Tweets from across the world, cross-referenced them with data on known transport nodes, and used the results to plot the most heavily used routes in cities, countries and continents. The full series of images can be found here at Fischer’s Flickr account. source: http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/nov/22/using-twitter-mapping-urban-planning-transport-networks