Abstract:
The highways, road networks, and other transportation links in cities hold
an important role in connecting a network of cities but, at the same time, it
had created more issues towards quality of the habitation when consider
current cities.
Lack of Safety on Roads becomes a major issue in the developed and
developing world due to over population of humans as well as vehicles,
which lead to many fatal incidents than any other course. There are many
factors which affects accidents on roads and among those factors, the
‘Driving behavior’ plays a crucial role in Road Safety.
Driving is an action of humans, which allows him/her motion through space
from place to place. The road landscape creates the character and the
spatial quality, of the space that the driver move through. The rate of
information gathered from the surrounding context is vital to decide the
driving safe. The accuracy of the information for a safe driving action
depends on the visual perception of the driver.
‘Southern Expressway’, which was introduced recently, allowed people to
move quickly from Western to Southern destinations of Sri Lanka and time
to time accidents were also recorded. So, the spatial qualities of the existing
road landscape might have impacted on the accidents happened on
Southern Highway from its initiation, which was the hypothesis of the
research.
The study focused on identifying the spatial characteristics of Southern
Highway by Data collection and Data analysis. Data is collected by two
means, then analyzed based on accidents recorded and “Black-Spots” were
identified, live recording of the expressway was analyzed to understand the
spatial characteristics in the identified ‘Black-spots’.
In conclusion, the study focus on to analyze the significant spatial
characteristics of Road Landscape in Southern highway, and reveal that
there is a direct influence from the spatial characteristics in identified
accident Black-spots. The study conclude to analyze only three spatial
characteristics, due to the scope and time limitations and there is an
opportunity to further studies in many other spatial characteristics in road
landscape.
