Gathering road safety critical information from users

Abstract

Traffic roads are a core element of GIS and many volunteered systems like openstreetmaps have the goal to make road data publicly available. Road users collecting geographical information and sharing them according some rules are a great opportunity to make our roads a safer place. Traffic accidents are a major cause of death and with increase in urbanization and motorization the risk is expected to rise higher. Research regarding road safety is mostly reactive; sections of the road where a lot of accidents has already happened are investigated and possibly causes are identified and then improved. This means, that people have to die in order to make those road sections safe. The system described in this chapter is a proactive method and can be operated by the community or some responsible authority. The gathered data is also very useful for different research areas like social sciences or civil engineering.