Abstract:
Periodical increment of traffic accident in appreciable manner is currently becoming a world
agenda especially in developing country like Ethiopia. The data collection plays an important
role in determining the main cause of RTA and defining the laws for road users that are safer
to be adopted in the future. And this investigation is designed to evaluate traffic crash data
collection and management system of Jimma town. To reach up on expected outcome; the
study used secondary data collected from Jimma police commission and city municipality.
Primary data were collected via oral, and written interview of different concerned bodies in
addition to site observation. Mainly three local road segments were selected for special
emphasis on the basis of secondary data and site investigation. Basically, descriptive and
statistical analysis approach was used to analyze the data collected. The study revealed that
the main causes of traffic accident were identified to be nature of road and driver behaviour
which accounts about 46% and 38% respectively. Statical analysis of accident data
demonstrated the severity index to be 22%. In regards to accident costing, the study
concluded that Jimma town is losing about 13 million birr per year due to the occurrences of
accident. This study evaluated the gap of existing crash data collection forms and forwarded
points to be included in details. Finally, the researcher proposed implementable corrective
measures like road maintenance; follow up on driver driving licence quality, awareness
creation work, installation of traffic sign and marks, vehicle examination as a management
system. To counter attack the problem faced due to road traffic accident the government and
other stakeholder must careful the issues to minimize road traffic accidents in Jimma town.
Moreover, the developments of uniform standard across the country and use of Google
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Global Positioning System (GPS) and online
data storing mechanism in parallel with manual recording were proposed as data collection
mechanism besides to crash data collection formats
