Traffic Accidents Detection using Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

Abstract

The mission of reducing the number and severity of traffic accidents becomes the dominant target of road traffic safety management worldwide. The main objective of this work is to analyze traffic accidents in temporal and spatial frameworks in the capital city Amman and identify hotspot zones in the study area. Several statistical analyses are conducted using SQL to give insight into the temporal distribution of accidents and to identify the most revealing accidents based on several attributes such as the year of accidents, the severity of accidents, road type, and lighting environment which enables the authors to do further investigations on the more frequent accidents. GIS-based statistical and spatial analysis tools are utilized to examine the spatial pattern of accident distribution in the study area for three successive years, hotspots are identified for clusters of high concentrations. The Nearest Neighbor Index (NNI) is used to analyze the pattern of traffic accident distribution based on selective parameters. This was followed by identifying hotspot zones for regions that showed clustering using the optimal hotspot analysis tool. Experimental results showed clustering for all tested groups, and thus hotspots were detected for these accidents in the study area. The importance of this work is in providing a spatial understanding of accident distribution in the capital city of Amman which can help policymakers of road safety setting out efficient strategies for traffic safety management and find optimal solutions as required for factors causing such accidents.