# Estimation of Driving Direction of Traffic Accident Vehicles for Improving Traffic Safety
## 5 Discussion and Conclusions  
When formulating traffic safety policies, various statistical data on traffic accidents can be considered, including road conditions, weather conditions, traffic volume, and vehicle types. The directional aspect of traffic accidents can also be critical in formulating traffic policies. Analyzing high-risk roads by direction for each local jurisdiction can prevent the waste of budget and law enforcement resources, allowing proactive and direct use in traffic planning and improving transportation facilities. It can also influence the formulation of traffic safety policies. For example, improvements can be made to driving conditions that reduce driver visibility, such as curvy roads or hills. It can be used to proactively remove obstacles, such as trees or facilities that pose a threat to traffic safety. This paper analyzes the likelihood of traffic accidents occurring based on the environment of the Northbound and Southbound directions. It proposes a method for estimating the driving direction of traffic accident vehicles using accident and destination information. We directly extract the latitude and longitude fields from the traffic accident data to extract the accident location. To extract the destination, we first use Named Entity Recognition to remove destination information from the _\"Report\"_ field written by the investigator. We then \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c} \hline \hline \multirow{2}{*}{**Administrative District**} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{**Northbound**} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{**Southbound**} & \multirow{2}{*}{**Total**} \\ \cline{2-2} \cline{4-5}  & **Number** & **Percentile** & **Number** & **Percentile** & \\ \hline Cheonan-si & 176 & 53.01\% & 156 & 46.99\% & 332 \\ Gongju-si & 196 & 41.26\% & 279 & 58.74\% & 475 \\ Boryeong-si & 108 & 40.75\% & 157 & 59.25\% & 265 \\ Asan-si & 132 & 36.97\% & 225 & 63.03\% & 357 \\ Seosan-si & 110 & 42.31\% & 150 & 57.69\% & 260 \\ Nonsan-si & 179 & 41.53\% & 252 & 58.47\% & 431 \\ Gyeryong-si & 23 & 39.66\% & 35 & 60.34\% & 58 \\ Dangjin-si & 11 & 36.67\% & 19 & 63.33\% & 30 \\ Geumsan-gun & 61 & 50.41\% & 60 & 49.59\% & 121 \\ Buyeo-gun & 80 & 40.20\% & 119 & 59.80\% & 199 \\ Seocheon-gun & 106 & 42.23\% & 145 & 57.77\% & 251 \\ Cheongyang-gun & 61 & 42.96\% & 81 & 57.04\% & 142 \\ Hongseong-gun & 118 & 42.29\% & 161 & 57.71\% & 279 \\ Yesan-gun & 174 & 45.08\% & 212 & 54.92\% & 386 \\ Taean-gun & 1 & 14.29\% & 6 & 85.71\% & 7 \\ \hline Chungcheongnam-do & 1536 & 42.75\% & 2057 & 57.25\% & 3593 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 3: Accident statistics by driving direction aggregated from the proposed method. use geocoding technology to convert the destination to latitude and longitude coordinates. Finally, we estimate the driving direction of the Northbound and Southbound directions by calculating the angle between the accident location and destination coordinates. In the experimental results, we analyzed 5181 traffic accident data from Chungcheongnam-do from 2016 to 2018. We examined the directionality of traffic accidents by AD. After the preprocessing stage, we analyzed 3593 data. We visualized the directionality information of the ADs at the village/town/district level on a map. The analysis revealed that Southbound traffic accidents accounted for 57.25%, higher than Northbound traffic accidents. In some areas, Southbound traffic accidents were as high as 71.42%. However, there were limitations, such as the need for more accurate direction information in some areas, making it difficult to estimate the directionality of traffic accidents. The method proposed in this study can be effectively utilized for traffic safety enhancement and accident analysis, even in countries where traffic accident guidance records are not mandatory. The ideal solution is to establish a policy that obliges the recording of traffic accident directions. However, the proposed method is one of the alternatives available when these policies are not feasible.