Identifying Black Spot Location Using GIS System in Kerbela City

Abstract

From the challenges facing the world in highway area is the life and financial loss due to traffic accidents. This is the case for Iraq because it is from the most dangerous countries in terms of traffic accidents. To reduce traffic accidents, the causes of these accidents such as; driver, vehicle and roadway should be determined. To diagnose the cause of accidents, there is an urgent need to determine the black spot along each road which is a location with high frequency of accidents. By knowing that, the actual causes may be pinpointed such as unsatisfied design or absence of suitable traffic signs. This will lead to effective solutions. The current system has been developed using Geographic Information System (GIS) to build new referencing points as bench marks spreading on the whole Kerbela road networks which will be used in the accident form. This system has been developed as nodes and links to define the roads networks. The developed system records all necessary information about the sites and also the required information about the accident such as; the type of accident (head-on, rear-on, sideswipe, vehicle with pedestrian collisions), the main causes of accident (driver, pedestrian, roadway) and environmental conditions. All these information are storage in the attribute for each feature in the GIS. The system may be adopted by traffic authorities to document the accidents and the referencing points should be established in the field. Some of roadways have already referencing points which could be recorded in the accident form