Gis Based Approach To Identify Road Traffic Accident Hotspots: A Case Of Debre Markos Town

Abstract

Road safety is a serious problem across the globe and its severity is more prominent in developing countries, especially in Africa. Ethiopia is no exception and road safety is one of the major challenges in the Debre Markos Town in the East Gojjam Zone will have to overcome in order to achieve its vision of being Ethiopia? most livable city by 2025. The prime goal of road safety is to reduce the number and severity of traffic accidents by identifying, implementing and evaluating measures to improve road safety. Road safety improvements are supposed to be applied to accident hotspots where they have the most significant impact, thus, identification of hotspots is an essential step in safety management. This study employed GIS spatial statistics tools to examine and map the trends and spatiotemporal distribution of road traffic accident hotspots in the Debre Markos Town from 2008 E.C.-2012 E.C. A total of 180 road traffic accidents occurred. It was observed that the highest number of road traffic accidents occurred in 2018/2019 (2011 E.C). The majority (52.4%) of road traffic accidents occurred on weekends. Furthermore, the time period between 18:00-23:59 recorded the highest number of road traffic accidents (33%). Ninety-two and a half percent (92.5%) of road traffic accidents re sulted from human error, 67.9% of these resulted from a vehicle-pedestrian collision due to pe destrians entering the roadway when unsafe to do so. Dual carriageways accounted for 30.4% of the total road traffic accidents, followed by freeways (26.7%) and single carriageways (25.8%). Spatial clustering of accidents and spatial densities of road traffic accident hotspots were evaluated using Global Moran's I spatial autocorrelation, Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) and Getis Ord GiS statistics respectively. Moran? I show that the occurrence of road traffic accidents was random. Ranking of hotspots using KDE was done with the help of pixel values of the observed locations while ranking of hotspots using Getis-Ord Gi* was done with the help of z-scores associated with statistical significance. Results of hotspot analysis delineated 10 hotspot locations at 90% - 99% confidence levels. Based on the Getis-Ord Gi* hotspot results, the Addis Ababa Bahir Dar way is of critical concern as it appears consistently throughout the five-year period under study and accounting for 80% (8) of the total recorded road traffic accidents. The results can be effectively utilized by various agencies for adopting better planning and management strategies to reduce and prevent road traffic road traffic accidents in the Debre Markos town.