Within a highway safety programme, a number of tools are used to collect, manage and analyse data associated with transportation system. Advantage must be taken of the opportunities which technological advancements can bring to highway safety. This paper reviews the current Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) programme which includes applied research into advanced technologies to improve highway safety. As part of programme, research has examined how technologies can be applied in collecting crash data. Technologies being evaluated include portable computers, GPS and GIS as a means of enhancing collection of crash locations. Once data is collected, other recent technological advances can be applied to management and analysis of this data. FHWA has begun using Rational Database Management Systems. Data models and Structured Query Language features of RDBMS have been found extremely valuable tools, and they have also reduced processing time. As regards research to improve the analytical tools, the FHWA programme includes two projects incorporating GIS. GIS systems are promising by recognising geographical aspect of highway system and by introducing spatially based analytical tools. Current efforts incorporate the various databases, make use of expert systems and provide a link to both these through interfaces designed for simple access and manipulation.
Abstract