A Data Driven Approach for Safe Route Planning

The rate of road accident fatalities depends on many factors including vehicle, roadway, environmental and driver characteristics. This research aims at reducing accidents using a data driven approach. Route planning applications such as Google Maps consider shortest time from a start point to a given destination. However, there are roads with design issues or high-risk roads that can result in fatal accidents and should be avoided. Although there are existing accident risk maps to help drivers to avoid such roads, these maps can be confusing and must be manually interpreted by drivers to find the safest path. The manual interpretation of the map is a time consuming and difficult task which results in ignoring the risk maps by drivers, due to complexity. This research aims at developing a novel tool to find the safest route. The resulting safe route is then compared to the path suggested by Google Maps.