Investigation on road conditions of Sholinganallur taluk, Chennai, using remote sensing and geographic information system

Abstract

Recording of road surface distresses like depressions, ruts, cracks are of great prominence in process to make sure the safety and comfort of all road users from pedestrians to motorists. The conditions of road ground work have severe effects on the riding and passing resistance. Hence, roads must be supervised inclusively to identify damaged road segments. This challenge has made GIS to be used as a system which is easy, cost effective and deployable. Toposheets from survey of India, satellite imagery IRSP6 of the study area, secondary data from transportation officials, field surveyed with photographs has been used as data in this study. From satellite imagery, up-to date roads like location, type of road, number of lanes, their conditions and other attributes are taken and required road networks map is generated. Collected GPS points are georeferenced and input which is carried using shape file generated in ARCGIS 10.3 software. Photos of road distresses are collected, geotagged and attached to the map which gives quality to the road map. The RS and GIS data are combined and utilized as input to the GIS dataset and then spatial query analysis is carried out. Secondary data of road accidents using GIS is processed and analyzed and compared with road distresses, statistical analysis is carried out and accident hot spots are generated which gives comparative analysis between road damages and accidents. The main motive of this study is to collate valuable spatially referenced road related data with accident data that will provide information for effective road maintenance. With this road maintenance can be done at early stages which in turn reduces repair costs and also assists in better visualization of the areas through GIS maps which requires repair.