The Land Transport Safety Authority is a body formed by the New Zealand government, having the mandate to maintain New Zealand’s state highway infrastructure. One important source of information that helps the Land Transport Safety Authority to make decisions is crash data - recording motor vehicle crashes, location, road condition and so forth. At the current time it is recognised that there is chronic under-reporting of crashes to the New Zealand Police.
In an attempt to address this problem, the Land Transport Safety Authority investigated the possibility of getting information from non-legislative sources. Tow truck operators have been targeted as a likely source of crash data, given that they will likely attend a crash scene.
A prototype solution was implemented by way of web-based forms for the tow truck operators to complete. The Information Engineering and Prototyping methodology has been followed, allowing the results achieved to be reproduced in the future. A major benefit of this system is that the underlying database is extensible, allows multiple concurrent users, and can be used to generate statistics - all elements required by the Land Transport Safety Authority in their project brief. The chosen data structure supports the development of data warehouses in the future, given the ability to draw information from disparate sources and present results (reports) in a pre-prepared or ad-hoc manner.
Future technological developments are discussed, including the ability to incorporate GPS~information and information gathering through the use of hand-held devices.
