Abstract:
There are more than 1,000 accidents occurred on rural roads in Thailand per year. Deficient road geometry is one of the main causes that leads to the accidents. Department of Rural Roads, Ministry of Transport, Thailand, is aware that road safety audit, especially auditing of road geometry, is a primary measure to tackle this problem. However, due to abundant workloads the department has been carrying, only handful of its remaining staffs are assigned to handle a road safety audit task. In order to overcome human resource limitation, Department of Rural Roads has developed a system, called “Rural Road Network Management (RM) System”. The Mobile Mapping System (MMS) technology is applied to collect road asset data such as traffic signs, road markings, bridges and culverts, lighting post, etc. The collected asset data is complemented with geographic information, which accuracy is within 0.10 meter tolerance. Moreover, the scenes of roads that MMS machine traveling on are also recorded in a movie format which can later be viewed in all spherical angles. All of collected data is stored in RM system database. MMS helps reduce fieldworks that previously had to be conducted by numbers of staffs because RM system can automatically detected risk spot on roads such as sharp curves, no-shoulder roads, intersections or junctions where there is no lighting equipment. After risk spots are located, the auditors can review the scene of road section again on RM system or in field. The developed system is proved to be cost effective option for road safety audit and can solve the human resource shortage problem of the Department of Rural Roads.
