One of the most important road safety interventions is the
elimination of accident black spots (places with accident
density higher than expected). The first step of this process
is the identification of these locations. There are several
methods for this purpose, but most of them are now outdated.
The primary objective of our five-year project was to adopt
data collection and analysis methods according to the related
developments of the last decades: 1) the spreading of GPS
technology 2) the appearance of tablets and smartphones, and 3)
the existence of critical amounts of accidental data (enough
for data mining approaches). This paper presents the final
results of our examinations. We prepared several methods,
regulations and computer software to integrate these
advancements into the daily routine. From the year 2011,
Hungarian police officers have used smartphones to record all
data about accidents while on the scene, including the GPS
coordinates, which leads to more accurate and reliable location
information. This allowed us to develop a novel black spot
searching algorithm (inspired by some data mining techniques),
based on the GPS coordinates of accidents. We have implemented
it as a web service, and the practical experience shows that it
performs very well, especially in built-up areas. Compared to
the sliding window method, the site consistency is
significantly higher, while the method consistency and the rank
consistency are quite similar.
