We have developed a mobile application to inform and raise awareness about traffic regulations and responsible behavior on the roads. This way, our intention is to help reducing the high rate of accidents that currently occurs in the highway Medellin-Bogotá, near to our school.
The ideas
In our municipality there are two routes of great influence that allow the access to our school: the road to the José María Córdoba airport and the Medellín - Bogotá highway. In both routes there is a intense traffic and multiple accidents occur, mainly on the Medellín-Bogotá highway, which is also the gateway to the eastern region of Antioquita and other cities in the country.
Due to the high accident rate, the traffic inspection of the municipality has been conducting campaigns around road safety and traffic regulations and our institution has been involved in some of these campaigns as target public. Students have received some lectures about the importance of knowing and respect the traffic rules in order to avoid accidents. And these educational talks made us feel motivated to take some actions that could also help to prevent accidents and promote safer routes.
The focus of our project is mainly on the Medellín - Bogotá highway, since the largest number of people from our educational community and inhabitants of the municipality pass through it. Its high rate of accidents has affected many people and resulted in deaths of relatives and acquaintances.
We have researched the cause of accidents and the most relevant factors are speeding, disrespect or ignorance of the traffic rules, excess of fatigue especially in drivers of freight and inter-municipal transport, driving under the influence of alcohol and other substances and all of them reflect somehow a lack of citizen culture.
The initiatives
We did a brainstorm about possible actions that we could undertake to reduce traffic accidents. Since we were approaching this problem in the school area of technology and computing, we decided to opt for a solution that is in line with current technological advances and we agreed that an app would be valuable since it could reach a great audience because most people have a mobile device.
We developed "GID vial", an app which works as a digital interactive guide, which intention is to raise awareness among road users about the rules that must be followeed to avoid being a cause or a victim of a traffic accident.
The first step was to get information from the municipal traffic inspection: rules, statistics, causes, campaigns and measures that have been taken to promote road safety. Also we complemented this source of information by additional research on internet.
The application contains traffic rules for different road users, these are Colombian traffic code rules. We found important that our app could also be used by people with reduced vision or reading difficulties. The application has an auditory part (allows you to listen to the ones on the screen). The application is designed for Android operating systems. To download the application a web page was designed, which contains information of the same and a button that redirects to the play store where it is possible to get the app.
Our project has had great acceptance among the inhabitants of our educational community and the municipality. Dissemination campaigns have been carried out through the municipal radio station, newspapers of the region and also had the support of the different campaigns that have been carried out in the municipality in terms of road safety.
