  Intense vehicular traffic is recognized as a global societal problem, with a
multifaceted influence on the quality of life of a person. Intelligent
Transportation Systems (ITS) can play an important role in combating such
problem, decreasing pollution levels and, consequently, their negative effects.
One of the goals of ITSs, in fact, is that of controlling traffic flows,
measuring traffic states, providing vehicles with routes that globally pursue
low pollution conditions. How such systems measure and enforce given traffic
states has been at the center of multiple research efforts in the past few
years. Although many different solutions have been proposed, very limited
effort has been devoted to exploring the potential of social network analysis
in such context. Social networks, in general, provide direct feedback from
people and, as such, potentially very valuable information. A post that tells,
for example, how a person feels about pollution at a given time in a given
location, could be put to good use by an environment aware ITS aiming at
minimizing contaminant emissions in residential areas. This work verifies the
feasibility of using pollution related social network feeds into ITS
operations. In particular, it concentrates on understanding how reliable such
information is, producing an analysis that confronts over 1,500,000 posts and
pollution data obtained from on-the- field sensors over a one-year span.
