ICT Devices: Vital Tools for Enhancing Road Traffic Monitoring

Abstract

Road Traffic monitoring involves the collection of data describing the charac- teristic of vehicles and their movement through road networks. Such data may be used for one of these purposes such as law enforcement, congestion and incident detection and increasing road capacity. Transportation is a require- ment for every nation regardless of its economy, political stability, population size and technological development. Movement of goods and people from one place to another is crucial to maintain strong economic and political ties be- tween the various components of any given nation among nations. However, there are different modes of transportation and the most paramount one to human beings is road transportation. Due to increase in the modes of trans- portation, road users encounter different problems such as road blockage and incidents. Therefore there is need to monitor users incidents and to know the causes. Road traffic monitoring can be done manually or using ICT devices. This paper focuses on how the use of ICT devices can enhance road traffic monitoring. It traces the brief history of transportation; it equally discussed road traffic and safety, tools for monitoring road traffic, Intelligent Transpor- tation Systems (ITS) use for traffic monitoring and their benefits. The result shows that the use of ICT devices in road traffic monitoring should be a Mil- lennium Goal for all developed and developing countries because of its nu- merous advantages in the reduction of the intensity of traffic and other road incidents.