A smartphone-based system for citizenry road traffic management in Uganda. Case Study: Kampala Metropolitan Area

Abstract

Road safety is an important development issue for all road users and yet it does not receive anywhere near the attention it deserves. The Government of Uganda (GoU) has invested in the use of modern Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in addressing myriad crime and traffic management through the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) Smart City Vision 2040 project for safe city (KCCA, 2015), and installation of Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras. Whereas government has put in place these different interventions, successful implementation still remains a major challenge and this abets the number of accidents on the roads. There hardly exists any tracking mechanism in that, once someone commits a traffic offence and he is charged he can commit a similar offence several times as each charge is independent of the previous. More so, these initiatives do not allow citizenry participation thus leaving the big gap between law enforcement agencies and the citizens. This study aimed at developing a smartphone-based system for citizenry road traffic management that enables the citizens to participate in road traffic mitigation, with focus on Kampala Metropolitan Area (KMA) as a case study. To address the above objective, a field study was conducted to determine the system requirements for the systems success in KMA. The data was collected using questionnaires and was analyzed and validated using the SPSS. Cronbach’s alpha which is most commonly used when you want to assess the internal consistency of a questionnaire was used. The field study findings arrived at a set of aspects that defined the Design Requirements for the system. These include: application installation environment, functionality, efficiency, learnability, usability as well as response time. Other technical requirements included traffic violations, Complaint tracking, Live Traffic, among others that informed the researcher on what to include in the system. The researcher developed a prototype which was used to verify the functions of the system. It was essential for the researcher to obtain the user’s opinion of the prototype and this was through testing the system with the help of some users. The application was downloaded, installed, deployed and tested on Smartphone devices and the innovation was found to be easy to use, reliable and error free.