Evaluation of Road Traffic Crash Data Collection and Management System: Case study of Jimma Town

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