Road Safety involves three major components: the road system, the human factor, and the vehicle element. Those three elements interlaced, and linked through georeferencing traffic events, are the basis of road safety analyses and improvement. The location perspective seems to be the most suitable methodology by which to analyze different traffic events. Geographical Information Systems offer an advanced engine to drive, both area-wide and location-oriented investigations. The possibility to raise and solve, easily, problems related to street segments, streets, intersections, and neighborhoods, may ease much of the labour-intensive production effort. Thus, more emphasis may be given to complex analyses and in-depth investigations. The paper describes an ArcInfo-based (GIS) road safety analysis system. This, newly developed, software package was designed for Haifa municipality in Israel and may be adapted very easily to any other city, whether in Israel or elsewhere. The package was tested successfully with accident data during a three-year period, and was adopted as the basic tool for road safety management, analyses and improvement. Work is carried out now to add a "Before/After" analyses module. The modular design of the system enables to add, easily, additional modules, as well.
Many highway agencies have been using GIS for analyzing accident data. Identification of problem locations is one of the most important aspect of accident studies. The purpose of the paper is to show how to use various modules of ArcInfo to perform operations such as fixed segment analysis, sliding analysis and spot analysis for identification of high accident locations. A prototype GIS system was developed for this purpose. Using the system, user can merge accident and roadway data, match the accident data and locations, analyze the data using fixed segment, sliding and spot analysis, calculate frequency and rate of accidents, select a variable for stratification to calculate mean and standard deviation of accident rates and frequencies and sort the sections based on selected criteria. The GIS will also call external C programs to calculate accident characteristics and expert system to identify priority sites.
A system has been developed to manage and display data about traffic accident locations easily, relating traffic accident integration data with digital road maps. The system can also analyze the data about circumstances concerned with traffic accidents in various ways. The location data of traffic accidents are managed not as XY coordinates but as the distance from the starting point of each route, using Dynamic Segmentation. Using this method, it is not necessary to input the location manually, thus the time of creating data can be shortened, in addition to preventing input errors. This paper describes the process of creating a route-system, technical problems encountered and various solutions to those problems. Considerations about a new route system process are also discussed.
GIS has become an integral element of overall systems development in local government. Responding to an ever increasing demand for data and analytical capabilities, the County of Riverside, California, has developed the Geographic Information System-Based Accident Records System (GIS BARS) over a two-year period. The GIS BARS Project is funded jointly by the County of Riverside, the State of California Office of Traffic Safety, and the Federal Highway Administration. Collision Info, an accident records program, has recently been released by the project team. The key to the successful development of this product is its ability to integrate data from a variety of sources to view the "big picture" in an effort to move away from cause and effect traffic engineering to a proactive posture. Consideration and prioritization of data conversion and integration are delicate processes in the ever changing fiscal and political climate of local government in Southern California. Collision Info offers integration of accident locations with centerline, parcel, traffic volume, land use, and survey GIS layers, and provides data links to traffic control device and pavement management databases. The GIS BARS project and Collision Info house and provide traffic accident data for twenty-six cities, five California Highway Patrol areas, two California Department of Transportation districts, and the unincorporated area of Riverside County.