Spatio-temporal study of road traffic crash on a national highway of Bangladesh

Road traffic crashes (RTC) or road traffic accident (RTA) has now become a great social alarm in Bangladesh and the situation is deteriorating day by day. The road infrastructure of this nation is not standard and compatible with the rapid growth of urbanization and motorization. Which is why, the dimension of this problem is too challenging to solve. Though crashes do not show any regular pattern, but scientific research can reveal some common phenomenon like location, time, collision type and so on. The best option for a country to address the road crash is making the whole route safe by providing all required measures. But for a developing country like Bangladesh where investment comes on the basis of priority cannot manage all those standard. In this situation characteristic analysis and black spot identification would be a compromised way to ensure road safety. The methodology of this study incorporates a framework on the basis of spatial-temporal study to identify most RTC occurrence locations or hazardous road locations by using kernel density (KDE) tool of Arc GIS. In this study, a very important and economic corridor like Dhaka to Sylhet national highway has been chosen to apply the method. This research proposes that KDE method for identification of Hazardous Road Location (HRL) could be used for all other national highways in Bangladesh and also for other developing countries. Some recommendations have been suggested for policy maker to reduce RTC in Dhaka-Sylhet especially in black spots.