In this era of automobile based personal transportation, road accidents have become of grave concern as a result of the deaths, injuries and suffering. An effective means of accident analysis and road safety management is needed to reduce the number and severity of these accidents. Effective road safety management requires large diversified georeferenced data stored in a reliable information base which must be easy to retrieve, analyse and update. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provide the tool and capability for conducting such functions. A GIS-based system for the systematic analysis and investigation of accidents and their causes is described. In particular, the methodology employed in the identification of high accident locations and the determination of accident causing factors is detailed. A statistical method based on multivariate analysis is utilised to determine accident factors or combinations of factors that are found to be over represented at the selected high accident sites when compared with the area-wide accident patterns. The system as developed is applied to accident data from Unley, a suburb in metropolitan Adelaide. (A)
Samenvatting