Each year, road accidents claim 1.9 million lives. Cyclists and pedestrians account for over a quarter of these tragic deaths.
On a positive note, this ominous global trend is generally improving. Throughout the past decade, activists, policymakers, traffic engineers, and urban designers, along with initiatives like Vision Zero, have significantly improved road safety globally. WHO reports that worldwide road fatalities have dropped by 5% in that period.
Tragically, the same report reveals a starkly different reality in some regions. Take Africa, where the road death rate increased by 17% between 2010 and 2021. The continent has the highest traffic death per 100,000 population ratio, with countries like Guinea, Libya, and Zimbabwe topping the ranking.
The reasons are many: the lack of established road safety practices, e.g., regarding speeding and seatbelts, drunk driving, unsafe vehicles, underdeveloped infrastructure, and more.
Luckily, some organisations work hard to address the issue. One of them is Amend—a non-profit team of engineers, urban planners, and community specialists united by the common goal of improving road safety in Africa.
Accurate and efficiently captured data plays a central part in Amend’s work. That’s why they teamed up with GoodVision to collect traffic records to collect traffic data during a recent road safety audit in Neves, São Tomé. How did it turn out?
Located in the Gulf of Guinea, the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe is an island country off the western coast of Africa.
Understanding Africa’s road safety landscape
Amend operates in Sub-Saharan African countries like Kenya, Senegal, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and more. Due to the need for low-cost mobility, the region has seen a boom in motorcycle use. Between 2010 and 2022, the number of motorcycles in Africa rose from 5 million to 27 million—and that’s excluding non-registered vehicles. The FIA Foundation reports that by 2030, there will be 80 million motorcycles on African roads.
Small vehicles have boosted the economy and made essential services accessible to millions, but they've also compromised road safety. Motorcyclists are responsible for up to 70% of road deaths in the region, varying by the country. Vulnerable road users like pedestrians and motorists are at the highest risk, with a total of over 225,000 killed on African roads just in 2021.
Children are especially at risk among vulnerable road users. Over 80% of kids in major African cities walk to school, making them twice as likely to die in traffic incidents compared to children elsewhere. Amend is one of the organisations committed to improving road safety for these children.
Children in some regions risk their lives walking to school each day, due to poor infrastructure, lack of pedestrian zones, inadequate lighting, and weak law enforcement.
The challenges of Amend’s road safety audit
A big part of Amend’s effort is working with policymakers, foundations, communities, and private companies to improve road safety around schools and ensure risk-free journeys for children.
Their projects involve scientific research, auditing, and consultancy for developing safe road infrastructure and promoting safety-first traffic engineering. Education, training, advocacy, and community consulting are also big parts of their work, serving to improve children’s road safety beyond traffic design.
Inefficient data collection
For all that, the team needs data. Each road safety audit thoroughly analyses vehicular and pedestrian traffic around schools, intersections, and other locations used by vulnerable road users. The accuracy and volume of traffic records are crucial to warrant reliable survey results. With limited regional funding, Amend must ensure that proposed road safety measures are based on solid data and will deliver the intended impact.
The problem is that traditionally, Amend has used inefficient, manual traffic data collection methods such as small radar guns, clickers, or pen and paper. Even after the surveyors transitioned to tablet-based data gathering, each road safety audit took longer than necessary, yielded limited volumes of data, and required a team of surveyors physically present at the site.
Why not a custom tool?
Creating a custom tool was an option, but after evaluating the costs and time required, the team ruled it out. As a non-profit with limited resources, Amend couldn't afford the expense and complexity of developing and adapting a bespoke solution for their projects across multiple countries.
Still, the research didn’t go to waste. The team discovered AI-based traffic analysis tools and decided to look for an off-the-shelf, user-friendly solution that was proven in diverse road environments.
This led Amend to partner with GoodVision for their latest pilot project, aiming to automate traffic data collection and gather more insights in less time.
GoodVision steps in (from the air)
The project involved analysing road safety around schools in the city of Neves in the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe. The locations were crossing points close to Escola Secundária de Neves and Police Station in Neves. The team needed to capture vehicle speeds, volumes, and classification by vehicle type, as well as pedestrian volumes and patterns.
The main objective of the pilot road safety audit was to evaluate how road markings influence vehicle speed at the selected locations. For that, Amend needed to measure and compare the speed readings before and after the intervention. To expedite the survey, the team made use of two key components of GoodVision: its drone video processing capability and the Video Insights analytical platform.
Capturing data with drones
Full compatibility with all traffic drones was an important reason for picking GoodVision. Normally, drones are most useful when traffic cameras don’t warrant a clear overview of the scene, e.g., due to obscured visibility or intersection complexity.
For Amend, an aerial view offered another advantage: clear presentation. A key part of Amend’s mission is to persuade road agencies and officials to prioritise road safety. The top-down perspective and clear outputs from GoodVision make it easier to showcase and explain road safety audit findings to non-engineer stakeholders. This clarity helps both traffic experts and decision-makers easily understand road safety issues.
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Drones offer a much clearer overview of the scene than traffic cameras.
Additionally, recording traffic footage involved much less effort than collecting data with manual methods. Previously, Amend conducted traffic surveys with radar guns or, worse still, pen and paper, which required a team of surveyors present at multiple locations around the scene. The process was inefficient and highly prone to human error. Capturing multiple parameters, e.g., traffic counts and specific manoeuvres, was only possible with a bigger team or a separate survey.
Conversely, only one person is required to fly the drone. In GoodVision, the data is extracted automatically from the footage with an over 95% accuracy rate. The recordings can also be used for many purposes and additional analyses in the future.
In GoodVision, the traffic data is extracted automatically
from the footage with an over 95% accuracy rate.
Analysing traffic data on the Video Insights platform
The recorded drone footage was uploaded to GoodVision Video Insights platform. Our AI algorithms automatically processed it there, extracting the relevant traffic data. Using manual methods, compiling road safety audit results could take days or even weeks, depending on the sample size. In GoodVision, the footage is processed, and data is ready for analysis in about one hour after uploading.
Then, the Amend team could access all the necessary records from a single graphic interface. In there, traffic modellers can:
- set up traffic scenarios,
- define vehicle movements they want to analyse,
- filter records for specific time frames or vehicle types,
- generate and share visual and numerical reports,
… and more. Amend particularly valued the intuitive interface and ease of use, which allowed them to adopt the new solution quickly.
Video Insights is a visual-first tool. Users can view all recorded movements as trajectories mapped directly onto the footage for a better understanding of traffic patterns. All vehicle types are marked with different colours and can be filtered to display particular selected records visually.
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Movement trajectories helped Amend and decision-makers visually assess road safety around schools.
Users can also easily define the movements they want to track. This is as simple as directly drawing entry and exit lines on the recorded scene. For area-based studies like occupancy times or road event analyses, users can create square-shaped zones.
All that was crucial for Amend.
- Faster adoption: The visual focus further facilitated quick adoption. Most users find it more intuitive to work with images than settings or number-based reports.
- Dangerous zone identification: From a road safety audit standpoint, trajectories help identify dangerous areas, e.g., places where vehicle trajectories often cross pedestrian trajectories, pavements, or bicycle paths.
- More convincing data: Like the drone perspective, displaying movements and traffic patterns visually helps Amend better present the road safety situation to stakeholders. Our partners then have the additional leverage needed to convince decision-makers.
The combination of drone compatibility, efficiency, data processing speed, ease of use, and accessibility worked out well for Amend.
Adopting Video Insights expedited the time needed to complete the road safety audit by 80%.
The data collected during the São Tomé pilot project was used to inform Amend’s infrastructure improvement projects for road safety around schools where children are at a high risk of road traffic injury.
After testing Video Insights in Neves, Amend decided to roll it out in future regional projects. The team faces region-specific constraints, such as local drone flight restrictions or relatively slow bandwidth limiting upload speeds. Still, Amend is determined to overcome these challenges on their mission to ensure children’s road safety in Africa—now with GoodVision’s help.
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With GoodVision, Amend specialists can easily track all movements around the surveyed location and filter them for specific parameters.
Make a move toward school road safety with GoodVision
Amend’s work shows that road safety can be improved in any condition and environment—all it takes is the right people and tools.
Curious to see how GoodVision can help you make the change for the better? Talk to our consultants and see what we can do!
