The Identification of Mistakes in Road Accident Records – Part One: The Use of Geographic Information Systems

The current method of checking police reported road accident data involves a rigorous process of manual and computer validation, with the objective of removing all the errors that exist on the accident report forms. This paper shows how a Geographic Information System (GIS) can be used to identify any mistakes that remain after this process has been undertaken by comparing variables on the accident report forms with accurate highway feature information obtained from other sources. The mistakes in the variables of district, speed limit, road class and road number were less than 10 per cent, less than 20 per cent for junction control, junction detail and pedestrian crossing facilities and over 20 per cent for carriageway type.

If highway data was routinely entered onto a GIS the above variables may not need to be contained on the police accident report forms, reducing the number of items collected nationally by over 2.2 million per year.