The effective development of a comprehensive speed management strategy, embracing such issues as road safety, speed limits and their enforcement, and the environmental and economic impacts of traffic, requires a systematic basis for the monitoring of road traffic speeds. This is required to prioritise and guide the implementation of speed management related road safety or enforcement initiatives; to help separate the impact of specific initiatives from that of wider policies or trends, so as to assess their effectiveness; and to establish the extent to which specific localised initiatives have only a local or a more widespread impact on driver behaviour. The resulting speed monitoring system captures data from a total of 120 representatively located speed monitoring sites, at which inductive loop detectors are used to monitor individual vehicle speeds. Data acquisition is on a rotating basis, typically over two week periods once every three months or so, with the resulting speed data being interrogated and analysed within a bespoke geographical information system, linked to cartographic based displays of speed limits, road accident data and speed enforcement activity. The GIS is constructed within a PC based ARC/View environment, which is both portable and adaptable, ideal for empirical studies. The speed monitoring sites have been selected to give a representative coverage of geography, road environments, speed limits and traffic levels across the whole County.The paper will then indicate how the resulting speed data is analysed and displayed within the bespoke GIS, utilising enhanced cartographic displays based displays to provide a comprehensive appreciation of the interactions between road safety management and speed enforcement activities and their apparent impacts on traffic speeds and on road accidents. For the covering abstract please see ITRD E135207.
Abstract