Investigation of the Effect of Roadway Elements on Traffic safety in Addis Ababa: A Case of Nifas Silk Lafto Sub City
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Date
2019-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Globally, road safety issue is the major economic, social and health problems, especially it becomes
the critical concern of developing countries like Ethiopia. In addition, it was forecasted to be the fifth
leading cause of death in 2030 but currently it holds the 8th position. According to WHO report (2018),
an estimated 1.35 million people are killed in road crashes and up to 50 million injured worldwide
every year. That’s nearly 3,700 people dying on the world’s roads every day. Research report of WHO
(2018) has also revealed that Ethiopia was found one of the world worst accident recorded country
where it accounts for fatality rate of 26.7 per 100,000 populations from which the capital city Addis
Ababa has took the highest share.
Hence, this research was mainly performed to investigate the effects of roadway elements for road
traffic accidents on arterial streets of Addis Ababa city specifically, on Nifas Silk sub city. On account
of engineering relevance and systematic sampling approach, thirty-Six road segments were extracted
from five streets using homogeneity principle. Subsequently, fifteen accident prone locations were
selected from the samples by employing point weightage approach and statistical check using three
years of accident database from AAPC and Nifas silk police department. Moreover, accident prone
locations were digitalized using ARCH – GIS 10.3 tool.
According to the objective of the research, seven explanatory variables were found significant from
the presumed twenty-six risk factors. And they are average travel lane width, number of U-turn,
Average Daily Traffic Volume (ADT), 85th % spot speed, availability of parking, median opening and
presence of visual clutter. In addition, point biserial correlation analysis was executed using SPSS tool
and it was adopted along with subjective engineering judgment and argument from previously
executed researches to select the stated explanatory variables. Therefore, excluding the strength of the
relationship, all variables have shown positive relationship with the number of road traffic accident.
Hence, change in any variable will affect the probability and magnitude of the accident number. On
the other hand, average travel lane width, availability of parking, average daily traffic (ADT) and
presence of visual clutter has shown strong correlation with coefficient of 0.778, 0.656, 0.646 and
0.635 respectively. While the remaining three variables have shown moderate relationship with the
dependent variable.
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Keywords
Accident-prone location, GIS tool, Traffic Safety, Point-Biserial Correlation, Roadway elements, Significant Explanatory Variables