Public Awareness of Traffic Safety based on Data and Text Analytics

Abstract

Traffic and road safety is a major concern of many governments around the world as it ensures the safety of its road users. Due to an increase in the number of road users, traffic-related accidents and fatalities have increased annually. Therefore, governments have stepped up their efforts to ensure the safety of road users and to reduce the number of traffic-related accidents and fatalities. However, these efforts have proven ineffective as the data gathered to measure the effectiveness of these efforts either lack credibility or are insufficient. This has led to inconclusive findings concerning the culture of road users and the extent of their awareness of traffic safety. Therefore, this paper performs a systematic data- and text-driven analytics and review of published literature on public awareness of traffic and road safety. The selected papers were first subjected to content analysis before being grouped according to the frequency of use of keywords discussing the issue at hand. As this method enabled us to successfully identify trends as well as the efficacy of traffic and road safety research, therefore, data and text analytics is an effective method of conducting a systematic literature review. The findings of this study will help traffic authorities gain credible insights into public perception, behavior, and attitude towards traffic safety awareness. Our assessment indicates that there are two important perspectives to be considered with regard to road safety; namely human and technology; the latter of which will be the main topic of study on public awareness of road and traffic safety. Moreover, an emerging trend in the literature suggests that more efforts should be allocated to promoting public awareness of road and traffic safety.