Rudel TRINDADE JUNIOR
Associate Professor
Department of Hydraulics and
Transport - DHT
School of Civil Engineering
Federal University of Mato Grosso do
Sul - UFMS
Rua Aracaju, 42, ap. 22
01240-030 - São Paulo - SP
Brazil
Tel/Fax: +55 11 3824 0890
E-mail: rudel@terra.com.br

Carlos David NASSI
Associate Professor
Graduate School and Research in
Engineering - COPPE
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro -UFRJ
Technology Center – Building G – room 106
Cidade Universitária – Ilha do Fundão
21949-900 - Rio de Janeiro – RJ
Brazil
Tel/Fax: +55 21-2562-7030
E-mail: nassi@adc.coppe.ufrj.br

information is a basic prerequisite for putting together public policies on road accident prevention, and notes that thirty thousand people die every year in Brazil as a result of road accidents (WHO, 2004). The Brazilian Institute of Applied Economic Research draws attention to the fact that the statistics published by the National Highway Department, record more than twenty thousand deaths each year; while Ministry of Health figures show around thirty thousand deaths per year. Because of these discrepancies, the quality of the information on road accidents in Brazil has been widely criticized.

The authors present a system for handling road accident statistics, based on geographically plotted information to be made available on-line to the police, highway operators and other interested parties: the iSIG. This system was developed with the aim of making road accident data more useful and bringing the disclosure of such information into line with national and international standards.

Deaths and injuries resulting from road accidents are among the principal problems confronting public health around the world. It is estimated that 1.2 million people die and 50 million are injured, every year, as a result of road accidents, which are classified as the ninth greatest cause of death, accounting for 2.8% of annual deaths worldwide (WHO, 2004).

The economic and social costs of this are huge, since approximately fifty percent of the world’s road deaths involve people between the ages of 15 and 44 years, representing a significant loss to the population’s economically productive sectors. The annual global cost is estimated to be US$ 518 billion (Jacobs et al., 2000).

Although the proportion of vehicle users is much higher in the developed countries, the harm caused by road accidents is greater in the developing countries, which account for 85% of total road deaths and where losses represent around 2% of these countries’ GDP (GRSP, 2005).

In absolute terms, looking at road death figures for the year 2006, the U.S.A. and Japan, with 43,443 and 6,277 fatalities, respectively, stand out among the developed countries. The Russian Federation and Brazil top the list of developing countries, with 35,600 (2003 figures) and 25,427 (2005 figures), respectively (IRF, 2007; BRASIL, 2007).

The quality of the road accident data in Brazil has been the subject of widespread criticism. According to the Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA), one of the greatest difficulties in preventing road accidents is the lack of information about the characteristics and costs of such accidents in Brazil: “the statistics are acknowledged as being flawed” (BRASIL, 2003).

The National Highway Board (Contran)1, in a document on National Highway Policy, stated that: “Brazilian road accident statistics, which ought to represent the consolidated information from all the country’s traffic entities, even after the implementation, by the National Highway Department (Denatran)2, of the National System of Road Statistics (Sinet), are still imprecise and incomplete, due to the precariousness and lack of standardization of the collection and treatment of the data” (BRASIL, 2004).

In a survey carried out by the authors, of traffic and transport specialists in all the regions of Brazil3, aimed at obtaining the opinion of these specialists as to the degree of reliability of the road accident statistics, it was learned that 75% of those surveyed consider the Brazilian statistics to be unreliable. The specialists surveyed awarded the following ratings, on a scale of zero to one hundred, with regard to the following characteristics of the statistics on road accidents in Brazil:

1Conselho Nacional de Trânsito.
2Departamento Nacional de Trânsito
3Between August 16 and November 7, 2005, 292 specialists responded to the survey.

It can be seen that not only the bodies responsible for organizing the road statistics, but also specialists from a variety of transport and traffic fields are aware of the serious shortcomings of the system for road accident statistics in Brazil.

The World Health Organization (WHO) adopts the premise that access to accurate and reliable information is a basic requirement for developing public policies on accident prevention, as well as drawing attention to the serious damage caused by road accidents (Penden et al., 2002). To this end, the use of new technology, such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), in the collection, organization and dissemination of road accident data has made a significant contribution towards improving the quality of the road accident statistics. It is considered that the benefits to road safety deriving from the use of GIS are much greater than just new tools for the presentation of information to road users, mainly due to the possibility of handling large quantities of data in a creative manner (Miller, J., 1999).

Brazilian internet users spend the most time navigating the internet, among those of eleven countries4 surveyed by the organizations Ibope/Net Ratings. According to this study, in September 2006, the country had 13.6 million active residential internet users, 14% up in relation to the same period of 2005. Each one of these users spent an average of 20 hours and 27 minutes on the internet during the month of the survey (CGI, 2006).

In a study of their own, Braga and Trindade Junior (2005) confirmed that the most popular government site, among Brazilian internet users, registered by the search engines is that of the Internal Revenue Service. However, the sites of state governments and judicial bodies are also visited. The “Detrans”5 (state highway departments) are among the ten most popular keywords registered by the internet search engines. It was verified, in the abovementioned study, that the information on road accidents that is made available to visitors to the Detrans websites is incomplete and is not standardized. It should also be pointed out that 85.2% of the Detrans do not present Denatran’s standardized road accident reports on their websites.

Braga and Trindade Junior (2005) consider it to be important, in terms of increasing the usefulness of the internet pages showing road accident statistics, that a single format be used, both for the Detrans pages and for those of Denatran, and that special attention be given to the data on fatalities, as well as to the adoption of indicators that make it possible to compare the data with those of the principal international information systems.

In this context, major shortcomings have been found in regard to the utilization of the internet as a means of providing fast, up-to-date and low-cost access to information on road accidents in Brazil. Although access to statistical reports on road accidents over the internet is quicker and cheaper, in comparison with printed reports, 42.8% of