The Design of a Traffic Management System for Ghana

Traffic congestion has become a menace in Ghana, especially, the Accra Metropolitan Area. Some issues that have been identified as having contributed to this include the rural-urban migration (with its resultant pressures on the planning of the metropolis), the displacement of residents from the central business district (to convert residential facilities there into commercial facilities), the poor road networks, the increasing number of vehicles, poor timing of traffic signals, and attitudes of road users. This project analyses the ICT intervention required for monitoring traffic on Accra roads with possible extension to other roads in Ghana. The methodology used includes reviews of various existing Intelligent Transport Systems of which Traffic Monitoring System is a subsystem, identifying what exactly constitutes congestion on the case study corridor, translating the identified problems into a network vision resulting in the design of a Traffic Monitoring System Architecture. Analysis is made of the data capture required, the issuing of alerts via Message Signs to road users, the communication network infrastructure and the associated facilities for multimedia data storage and retrieval. Considerations of collaborations with agencies for traffic incident management on the corridor to ease congestion has been analysed as well as the security implications of the various stages of the design.