GPS Improves Traffic Flow — The Hard Way
Police are testing the use of handheld PCs with GPS data to speed up their investigations of road accidents.
The Highways Agency is working with police forces in Surrey and Warwickshire as part of a three month trial, which began last week. Via handheld PCs, police will get access to Ordnance Survey data to pinpoint accident location along with any other information that they need.
Road accidents can take as long as six hours to investigate, during which whole roads or motorway lanes and sections may be closed, and the trial is aimed at speeding up the time it takes for police to make a site survey and get traffic moving again…
Don’t be put off by the fact that this article is only UK-related. Most of my readership is in North America and Asia, but believe me this has two major implications world-wide.First of all is the technique explained in the article itself. We’ve all seen police investigatings and documenting the scene after major traffic accidents. It’s dangerous and time consuming for a police officer to roll his or her little measuring wheel down the highway. Using an assisted GPS measuring tool will make this data collection much quicker and more accurate. GPS-enabled cameras are also a boon to this kind of task … a picture is worth a thousand words but a picture withthe exact location it was taken from documented is worth even more.
The second reason I feel this news item is worthy of note is in the background. Today, in the majority of police jurisdictions, the exact locations of highway accidents are typically only located within a mile or a kilometer. If one is doing reseach to make highways safer, it’s not hard to go to the police agencies responsible and find out how many accidents have been investigated within a given mile of Intersate. A good example is here:
But locating to the mile, or even to the tenth of a mile will not always give a traffic engineer the information needed to design around a specific road hazard. Investigating with the proper GPS tools and locating accident sites to precise geographic coordinates may well save future lives, and instead of adding costs will save money along with lives.
April 10th, 2006 at 8:29 am
Should be obvious, Dave, and maybe you have posted on it already….
Most of the ambulance services in our area have gone out with GPS units and have predesignated LZ’s for use by our EMS helicopters.
Find 100 or so large, unobstructed areas suitable for the helicopter in your county, and one of them will be close to an accident scene.
Many ambulance districts are also equipping manager’s vehicles with GPS, and they can accident coordinates to our dispatchers, guiding us directly to a scene.
I hope the life-saving effects of GPS are made known, so taxing agencies devote funds to insure a few EMS vehicles have them aboard.
April 11th, 2006 at 12:25 am
I have posted a thing or two, GB. In fact when I worked a few years ago as a consultant in the mapping field I tried to get a state-wide program kicked off. The are a lot of issues, including (sadly and dangerously) a hidden “gotcha” called map datums that could really hurt in this kind of work … the coordinates issued from a ground based GPS nav unit may not correspond with the FAA-apprived unit in your bird. Instead of fixing this, it’s a lot easier for a lot of companies and government groups to just back off becuase of real or assumed liability issues.
How about a guest spot here some day when you give us a little synopsis of a ‘typical’ evac mission and what the GPS does (and doesn’t) do well for you?