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July 2003

Professionals merge class with work

Florida Highway Patrol Capt. Keith Gaston and Lt. Urana Harris, in an FHP mobile command post, demonstrate how the GIS technology they learned at UNF has provided a valuable tool in accident investigations. A pilot program is under way to see if the system can be used statewide.

Florida Highway Patrol District Commander Capt. Keith Gaston has seen his share of traffic accidents and done his share of accident reports. Each report contains information such as the type of accident, road conditions and approximate location of the crash.

That information can provide important clues to accident trends on roadways and perhaps highlight the need for traffic control improvements in certain areas. Gaston decided to look for a reliable, relatively easy way the information could be graphically displayed to make it possible to spot trends.

That’s where UNF’s Geographic Information System Theory and Applications class with Dr. David Lambert proved beneficial. As graduate students in the new course, Gaston and FHP shift commander Lt. Urana H. Harris developed a pilot program in Clay County that could be used throughout the state. With more than 200,000 auto crashes recorded each year in Florida, the benefits to finding a way to handle the mounting information were obvious.

Gaston’s class project used GIS to accurately plot the location of crashes in Clay County. Before this, the location of a crash was a combination of the roadway name and a cross street, an inexact measurement.

To solve this problem, a GPS receiver was installed in an FHP patrol car to import latitude and longitude coordinates into a laptop computer. The information was then transferred from a laptop to a crash report server and then to a geographical information server. During the January pilot project, 21 crash reports were entered into the system.

The idea has statewide implications. A $197,000 grant from the Florida Department of Transportation has been approved to evaluate the feasibility of a statewide project. About $100,000 will be for contractual services from UNF.
Gaston sees the information having a variety of uses, ranging from analysis of accident trends to tracking calls for service. The information also may be used by the DOT in planning highway improvements, he said.

The long-term goal is to have all traffic crash reports entered and sent to different users. Anyone would be able to view up-to-date data via the web for the state, a county, a community or even for a particular roadway.

Lambert said the GIS course was targeted toward students in the master’s programs for public health, public administration and sociology. The intent was to provide graduate-level students with an opportunity to use GIS in their own professions.

The course, CIS 5930, will be offered again this fall and is open to all graduate students and faculty at UNF. There are no prerequisites.

To view other projects for the GIS class, visit www.unf.edu/dept/ofe/gis.html.