A study on traffic accident measures in municipal roads by using GIS

Traffic Accidents are serious problems in all countries. In Japan, thousands of people are killed due to traffic accidents every year. Therefore, the Government of Japan has submitted and put into operation many measures to reduce traffic accidents. However, choosing effective measures is difficult because it involves many hazardous levels, various locations of accidents, various traffic volumes, etc. In case of municipal roads, the problem is more difficult than arterial roads because of their wide ranges of accident circumstances, lower traffic volumes, and unknown hazardous levels. Therefore, this study focused on submitting indices of hazardous spots and hazardous meshes as a methodology to choose measures appropriately for the scope of municipal roads. To investigate the method, GIS is used to analyze traffic accidents, and Utsunomiya City was chosen as a case study area. The Microcomputer Accident Analysis Package (MAAP) was used as a tool to do cluster analysis and density analysis. Cluster analysis is a function to determine hazardous accident spots, and density analysis is for determining hazardous accident meshes. As the result, many hazardous meshes are concentrated in the city centre. Furthermore, the important thing is that we classified hazardous levels of traffic accidents and divided the measures into two groups called spot measures and mesh measures for reducing traffic accidents on municipal roads.