Active travel street intervention ideas in Malta: Evaluating citizen feedback using sentiment analysis

Within the sphere of co-creation and experimentation and the promotion of sustainable urban mobility, urban living labs (ULLs) and digital engagement platforms have emerged as key methodological approaches and tools. This paper focuses on the context of a car-dependent island in the Mediterranean-Malta, where the introduction of active travel interventions is an essential but persistently difficult undertaking. The study aims to test a fully virtual method to better understand the perceptions of the islands' population of such interventions. The study deploys a Virtual Urban Living Lab (VULL), a purposely designed online participatory platform with interactive activities in which participants can give feedback on proposed intervention ideas and propose their own. The feedback was collected from 113 users over the span of a week in December 2023. Using sentiment analysis conducted through a large language model (ChatGPT 4), the findings from the VULL shed light on how the Maltese population perceives stakeholder-proposed ideas to re-design urban streets. A discussion on the main challenges and points of contention, and the positive features of the proposed intervention follows. The paper concludes with an overview of the policy-relevant feedback and the potential for urban planners and policy-makers to use VULL and language models as tools for understanding public sentiment.