The Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT) is updating is electronic Safety Management System (SMS) to geographically display information about roadway areas with high incidents of vehicle accidents so that it can better probe underlying causes of accidents.
Using a new geographic information system (GIS) installed on the front end of the SMS package, based on Intergraph’s Mapping and Geospatial Solutions, anyone in the NDOT can access and analyze the road data without special training. An additional advantage is the updated system’s ability to graphically represent incidents within a single intersection, which might otherwise appear as two different locations because of different road names, said Kelly Anrig, NDOT’s chief of safety engineering.
“Our analysis will become more accurate and in-depth with this new geographic component,” he said. “This will allow us to better address our primary goal of making Nevada roads and highways safer for motorists.”
Intergraph’s GIS product helps merge accident data with a roadway base map and then relates the two together to create a single, consistent base map, Anrig said. That allows NDOT to use corridor analysis to examine accidents occurring within given proximities of intersections; compile mid-block analyses to track accidents occurring away from intersections; and merge groups of data, regardless of format, to more easily identify relationships between crashes and other factors such as pavement conditions.
