A web-based GIS for road traffic accident reporting and emergency services routing: A case study of Kampala District

Abstract

The frequency of road accidents is on the rise in Uganda today with many of these accidents going unnoticed, and many causalities losing their lives while being transferred to health facilities. This, in part, is caused by poor navigation knowledge of first responders to the nearest competent health facilities. This research aimed at developing a web-based Geographic Information System (GIS) application for accident reporting and emergency services routing. The application is meant to be simple to use: and a fast means of sharing road accident information with different stakeholders, such as the Uganda police, Ministry of works and transport, and the general public.

The web application was built using the Python web development framework in conjunction with a templating system flask framework. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) was used for creating web pages, along with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript. A PostgreSQL geodatabase was integrated for storage of road traffic accident data. Reported accidents are mapped as a heat-map layer and superimposed onto a Google Maps-base map for visualization. Details of each reported accident can be viewed in the system My Profile tab by a user. For improved accuracy, the application captures the user’s geographic location using the geolocation tool embedded in the system; this allows the system to navigate the user to the nearest health facility of choice. The application also has other functionalities such as statistical analyses of reported data (e.g. time and a monthly trend of accidents), location analysis and road user accident analysis. The developed system was tested through interviewing target road users around Kampala and analyzing the feedback: the results showed that the users found the application very useful and implied that it would greatly improve accident information management and save more lives by navigating first responders to the nearest competent health facility.