Abstract
Addressing fatalities on road is a major concern in most countries in the world. South-East Asian countries are no exception. In Indonesia, three persons die on road every hour. Understanding where and how road traffic crashes happen is imperative before the most efficient countermeasures can be devised and implemented. In this paper, three tools—hot spots, hot zones and hot clusters—are used to identify sections of two main highways in the Province of Aceh that require most urgent action. Many countermeasures have been developed to address the problem of black sites (hot spots). Examples of implementation often come from Australia, Europe or North America. Less research exists on countermeasures in hot zones, even less so in the Global South (less developed countries from Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America). This research applies quantitative spatial analysis that builds on existing works using the hot zone methodology and goes a step further by suggesting relevant countermeasures. More precisely, by taking into consideration the global urban-rural divide, this paper attempts to identify the most dangerous highway sections, in Indonesia, and to suggest appropriate hot zone countermeasures based on the characteristics of these hot zones. The results showed that urban highways, when compared to rural highways, were characterized by higher crash rates and a larger number of hot zones. Formulating hot zone countermeasures in urban environments should therefore consider their associated dangerousness and environmental features. Proposed countermeasures in urban roads include a stricter monitoring of the use of helmet, seat belt and cellphone, and the development of periodic communication and awareness campaigns.
Highlights
The World Health Organization (WHO) reported 1.35 million deaths on roads in 2016 worldwide [1]
A hot spot generally refers to a dangerous road location where the actual crash rate is higher than the critical crash rate [2,3,4], whereas a hot zone refers to a dangerous road location made of two or more continuous segments that contain an actual crash rate higher than a threshold value [2,5,6,7]
The findings show that the majority of the hot spots, hot zones and hot clusters are found on the East road, and more in the districts of Banda Aceh, Aceh Besar, Aceh Utara and Lhokseumawe
Summary
The World Health Organization (WHO) reported 1.35 million deaths on roads in 2016 worldwide [1]. In order to further reduce the number of road traffic crashes, identifying the most dangerous road locations is a fundamental step to formulate effective policy interventions. Roads in urban and rural regions can display different distinctive patterns of hot spots and hot zones [2,3,5,14], possibly due to variations in road geometries (e.g., length of road segments, number of intersections and road signage) and other factors like road user behavior. Further investigation is needed on comparing hot spot and hot zone analysis to identify hazardous roads in different spatial contexts (i.e., urban cores, urban fringes, suburbs and rural regions), so that appropriate road safety measures targeting dangerous road locations can be put forward
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