Bad driving alert application

Abstract

Background: Accidents are an unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, typically resulting in damage or injury, these are caused due to bad driving, over Speeding, distraction to driving, drunken driving and so on. All the above are over ridden by bad driving as discussed. A bad driving habit can be defined as any driving practice that is inherently unsafe, increases fuel consumption and/or places greater strain on a vehicle’s components leading to greater operational costs. The Kampala-Masaka highway has been labelled a death-trap by some due to the numerous bad driving activities there, carried an article about traffic accidents on the Kampala - Masaka highway and their possible causes. Many are mentioned; flawed road design, blind bends, bad surface and evil spirits craving sacrifice because they are disturbed by the road. Then there is of course also the option of human error and a vehicle in dangerous mechanical condition. Passengers and other road users can also take part in curbing down the vice of reckless driving by use of ICT to report such habits. It’s this that has driven the researchers to come up an information App that enables passengers to report bad driving to concerned parties in order to minimize accidents along Kampala-Masaka Highway. Main objective: To develop an information application that enables passengers to report bad driving to concerned parties in order to minimize accidents. Methods: We carried out a cross-section survey targeting a sample size of 60 people along Kampala-Masaka high some of them being off the road like the vehicle owners whom were in other places, we used questionnaires with open and closed ended questions for the passengers and vehicle owners, then we used interview guides for the traffic police officer. We analyzed our findings from questionnaires using IBM SPSS because of its simplicity, effective data management, dynamic and has useful tables and graphs, ease to follow command language and well documented user manual. Results: 60 participants took part in this study, 25% vehicle owners (10 male and 5 female), 8.33% traffic police officer, 33.3% passengers and also interacted with 33.4% drivers. 4 vehicle owners had a personal owning of the vehicle while the 11 were company owning among these 8 could receive alerts to their drivers’ bad driving. We also found out that among the 20 passengers 12 of them had ever witnessed an accident. For the officers we found out that almost a day they get drivers involved in bad driving activities due to ignorance, greed for money, driving long distances and others could just tend to drive recklessly. All the officers had measures to bad driving victims which included stopping them, penalties, enforcements and all their records and report generation was manually and automatically. Conclusion: In conclusion, the study showed that the majority knew about bad driving activities, all the vehicle owner drivers’ details were registered and electronically. Most passengers could use public means of transport. Furthermore, from the study 98% participants agreed that technology could solve bad driving activities to a smaller extent and most passengers had never raised a complaint about bad driving hence this boosted our problem solving.