Georeferencing road accidents with google earth

As society has evolved, mobility practices have changed, improving the way travel takes place and the time it takes. High mortality caused by high accident levels has reached unsustainable levels. Research intoroad mortality is scarce and limited to comparative statistical exercises which go no further than defining accidenttypes. In terms of sharing information and mapping accidents, little progress has been made, aside from thenormal publication of figures, either through yearly tables or web pages. This paper describes a road accidentgeoreferencing project for the Lisbon district involving fatalities and serious injuries during 2007. In the initialphase, individual summaries were compiled giving information on accidents, collected by the security forces: thepolice force (Polícia de Segurança Pública - PSP) and the National Guard (Guarda Nacional Republicana -GNR). The Google Earth platform was used to georeference the information in order to inform the public and theauthorities of the accident locations, the nature of the location, and the causes and consequences of the accidents.