How Public Transit Agencies Deal with All Your Angry, Mean, and Terrible Tweets

You’re “slowly sucking our souls and our money one messed up day at a time,” they write. “Why must you be so bitchy?” You’re “a disgrce.” “:/ u suck!”

Such is the abuse leveled at public transit agency Twitter accounts every day—truly and unendingly negative. “Negative” is putting it kindly. According to a new study in the Journal of the American Planning Association, public transit receives more racist, classist, sexist, and altogether discriminatory tweets than other much-maligned public and private services, including social welfare programs, the IRS, and airlines (even United!). The study, which coded two years of tweets according to their negativity, found that the poor Chicago Transit Authority got only a bit less online ire than did “Obamacare.”* Boston’s MBTA came in just above “welfare queen.”