According to the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately 1.35 million people die each year due to road accidents. Road traffic injuries cause considerable economic losses to individuals, their families, and nations as a whole. Governments, NGOs, NPOs & other agencies are constantly working towards implementing programs and measures to improve road safety across the globe.
A hill-state in the north of the Indian subcontinent – famed for its untouched natural beauty, snow-capped mountains, and pristine lakes – has been especially vulnerable to fatalities caused by road accidents.
Although not wearing seatbelts and drunken driving are among the leading causes for these accidents, a surprisingly high number of them were also caused by bad road conditions like potholes, steep gradients, a lack of crash barriers and roads under construction. Adding to this are the accidents caused by extreme weather conditions – the state has extremely different weather conditions than the rest of the country, with snowstorms and hail being a regular occurrence.
The government realized that in this era of digitization, a comprehensive digital solution to manage road accidents and safety is one of the primary tools they should consider using to minimize the losses these accidents cause, and began to search for a solution that could effectively capture the complex data that needs to be recorded in the difficult terrain of their state.
Why go digital for road safety?
In most of the countries, stakeholders in the transportation sector currently depend on legacy software platforms and solutions to perform different operations for generating accident and safety reports, analyzing issues, and recommending countermeasure actions. The tools and techniques employed are also holding back their capability to process data from different sources. There are also challenges in terms of rigidity while accepting inputs, user-friendliness, and so on. To overcome these inabilities of the outdated legacy systems, and to approach road safety management scientifically, to arrive at targeted solutions that improve road safety, a digital solution is the need of the hour.
Enter Experion
Experion, in a project funded by the World Bank, worked with a renowned the British transportation firm to develop an ingenious digital solution that brings all types of data sources, analytics, and dimensions into a single solution framework and makes it easy to perform all analysis and recommendations on a single platform.
The solution is a step towards scientifically addressing road safety management – it helps identify accident-prone spots, reasons for accidents, and measures for taking remedial action in this direction. This solution also helps vital stakeholders such as the Public Works Department, Police Department, Transport Department, and Department of Health and Family Welfare to collaborate effectively and efficiently to ensure road safety.
The State Govt zeroed in on this solution to help them battle the number of road accidents they had been facing, and to help minimize the number of lives lost to these avoidable mistakes. They have implemented the solution and have been successfully working with it for over five years now.
What features does a road safety management system need?
The solution should provide near real-time, complete, and relevant information on road accidents occurring in any part of the country or state to concerned authorities.
The solution should identify accident-prone locations and analyze trends in road accidents to monitor the roads’ safety. This will enable stakeholders to plan more efficient strategies in line with international safety standards to reduce the number and severity of road accidents and their impact on human lives.
Advanced geospatial algorithms must be used to identify road safety problems of each specific region and recommend counter-measures to reduce casualties from road accidents.
How solutions like this one can help
The solution is equipped with a real-time alert mechanism that enables the concerned stakeholder to reach the accident site and capture various critical parameters of the accident like the GPS coordinates of the accident location, type of vehicle, details of those involved in the crash and pictures. This data can be analyzed and generate meaningful insights such as accident data status, accident severity analysis, reasons, and impacts of the accident, etc.
As a platform that would be used by different members of the local government bodies, it was built to ensure a superior user experience to all stakeholders, making it easier for them to report even the minor accidents that go unreported due to the complex manual procedures involved previously.
Leveraging the meaningful insights our system provides, the concerned authorities can develop and implement safety performance indicators – measurements that are statistically related to accidents or injuries and are used in addition to accident or injury statistics to indicate safety performance or to understand the process that leads to accidents.
The digital solution monitors and assesses the road safety situation in each stage of road development and enables stakeholders to make interventions early if they show undesirable results. The solution also allows users to measure and compare safety measures implemented in different countries and compare the before and after scenarios and data after specific actions were taken.
The solution tracks, stores, and analyses the most salient road safety issues and sorts them according to their contribution to fatalities and injuries. With this, the road authorities can set road safety targets and relevance standards. These targets and standards can be used to educate the road users, the drivers, the vehicle, and the infrastructure manufacturers to improve the road safety situation.
The solution enables authorities to formulate and develop superior road safety strategies and action plans based on inputs, targets, and safety performance indicators customized for each geographical region. The system also allocates each action plan to the most suitable department for implementation and monitoring. It collects feedback and analyzes its effectiveness and suggests alternatives or tweaks if the accident rates do not reduce.
Conclusion
Our transportation practice is determined to contribute towards safer roads, utilizing advanced digital technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, IoT, and advanced analytics. If you have a requirement we can help with, please contact us at sales@experionglobal.com.