Animal-vehicle crash database and map application launched
The Estonian Road Administration and the environmental consultancy company Hendrikson & Ko have developed an app after analyzing data about animal-vehicle crashes that took place on state roads.
On the basis of the data, a public map application was developed showing users the road sections where collisions with animals are most likely to happen, the Road Administration said on Friday.
The purpose of the work was to organize and geolocate the information about animal-vehicle crashes forwarded to the Road Administration via the hotline at 1313 between 2014 and 2018 and to build a database.
Villu Lukk, head of the environment service at the Road Administration, said: "In addition to danger posed to humans, animal-vehicle crashes cause damage also to animals, while roads with intense traffic break up wild animal habitats."
"The map application enables users to find out on which roads the biggest numbers of accidents involving wild animals have taken place and where the dangerous road sections are located. It is a good tool for the Road Administration, our cooperation partners and ordinary participants in road traffic alike," he said.
The dangerous road sections have been identified using data about the locations of accidents involving wild animals and spatial data about landscape elements facilitating the movement of wild animals.
The analysis identified 1,443 statistically significant places of concentration of accidents on a total of 322 kilometers of state roads. Such clusters account for approximately 1.9 percent of the total length of the Estonian state road network.
The identification of clusters is based on accident data for the ten-year period from 2009-2018 and the clusters were identified using the KDE+ methodology developed by the Czech Transport Research Center, which has been used for the analysis of animal-vehicle crash data in several similar surveys in recent years.
The map application in Estonian is available here.
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Editor: Helen Wright