“YAK Data” surveys danger roads in Pattaya to reduce losses from road accidents.
Every day, people losses their lives in road accidents while related agencies are trying tirelessly to prevent and protect them from the incident. Nowadays, new technology has been implementing to help solve many problems in our day-to-day life, but how could it help in this kind of problem.
YAK Data is an artificial intelligence system which provides accidents and death tolls database via LINE Chatbot “@yakdata,” along with insights from the field survey to collect accurate data to sustainably and practically solve the problem.
On 22 January 2020, YAK Data, teamed up with local polices and law enforcements, took on a field survey at main roads and secondary roads in Pattaya township after acknowledged from the Road Safety Centre database that many accidents usually happened at some parts of the roads. In 2019, there were 435 crashes on in Pattaya township, most of the accidents occurred upon 7 AM, and 5 PM, especially on Sukhumvit road (40 crashes) and Thep Prasit road (20 crashes) led to a number of death toll and injuries.
Pol.Maj. Arus Sapanont, Pattaya Traffic Police, cited that Pattaya Township has road accidents at many points in 2019. Motorcycles accounted for most of the accidents, with driving without safety helmet, drunk-driving, and drive against driving law as the biggest cause of crashes. Moreover, some road conditions are not proper for safe driving such as a U-turn that is too close to an intersection so primarily, the police closed the U-turn and use road barriers to clarify driving lanes to mitigate road accidents. Another solution is to set up checkpoints because drivers tend to drive faster on some straight roads and sometimes, teenage motorcycle gangs race on the road against the law and often got into accidents.
However, in the long run, people participation is a more sustainable and practical solution to road accidents. People need to abide by the driving law, participates in the problem solving, and community should be the police whistleblowers to diminish the number of the road accident concretely. This process is in line with the aim of “YAK Data” to acknowledge people on accident database and to encourage them to be the real-time reporters to solve the problem sustainably. This field survey and co-analysis of the root causes of the accidents marked the first step for “YAK Data” and Pattaya police to share and build a database system for traffic and accident in the area, the result of the project will further announce to the residents.
“YAK Data” is a co-pilot project of the Thailand Institute of Justice (TIJ), TIJ Executive Programme on the Rule of Law and Development (RoLD Programme), ChangeFusion Group, and Opendream Company Limited. It aims to develop an artificial intelligence system to collect road accident and death toll data via LINE Chatbot @yakdata and www.yakdata.org which introduced on this New Year festival.