Telematics: Solution to Reduce Road Accidents on Indian Roads

The number of fatalities due to road accidents in India is increasing at an alarming rate. Majorly road accidents are caused due to bad driving habits, road infrastructure problems, vehicle quality issues, unfavorable weather conditions and chaos on roads like public processions, stray animals, etc. Out of the bad driving habits, in 2017, over-speeding accounted for maximum number of the road accident deaths. A strong sense of responsibility lies on vehicle manufacturers part to help the government agencies to reduce road accidents in India. This paper highlights use of telematics to counter road accidents caused by bad driving habits of Indian drivers. Any connected vehicle solution is capable of capturing parameters like vehicle speed, Global Positioning System (GPS) location with time, regularly while the vehicle is in motion. Combining these anonymized vehicle parameters with geographic data of roads, speed hot spots can be prepared. These hot spots visualization will give the traffic police department information about the locations where over-speeding is happening at what particular time of the day. This will enable them to deploy their manpower efficiently and hence effectively penalize the Indian drivers who are constantly over-speeding on identified roads. This solution will involve decoding of the raw vehicle data, geocoding the latitude-longitude of vehicle events and then visualizing the hot spots through geospatial database. The key take away from this study is that connected vehicle environment not only benefits the customer but can also help the government agencies to reduce accidents on roads.