GIS based identification of hazardous location on national highways of Bangladesh

Abstract

Developing countries like Bangladesh are now facing a serious road safety crisis and without giving severe importance with significant improvement in the relevant sector, the problem will be worsening in the coming years. Recent analyses illustrate that road crashes are normally clustered in some specific sites, routs or locations and now the main challenge is to find out those locations exactly. Traditional analysis techniques do not have any spatial referencing with the road network but only shows some historical database to identify the crashes locations. Consequently, it’s become difficult to find out the crash locations for the time being. A GIS based smart road safety system with digitize road network can help us to identify the crash locations on road which will lead us to locate the hazardous road locations (HRL) after some spatial query. Specific treatments at those locations can greatly reduce the overall number of road crashes. Under this circumstance this study will provide an effective method to identify and analysis of hazardous road locations in national highways of Bangladesh by a digitized road map exclusively for crash investigation using Geographic Information System (GIS). Crash data has been analyzed for three years, 2008-2010. Criteria of HRL identification is set as the locations where the number of fatal crashes in 0.1 Km to 0.5 Km of road over a period of 3 years equals or exceeds 3 crashes. Characteristics analysis carried also on some selected spots to understand the actual facts behind the crash on those locations with some general countermeasure to twist the locations safe. This low cost method of identification can be used in other highways as well as LGED road of Bangladesh and also in other countries as well because of its easy adoption and compatible nature.