From web scraping to spatial analytics: an open-source-based approach for road safety in Senegal

Abstract

Road traffic accidents represent a major public health and road safety challenge worldwide. In many developing countries such as Senegal, the lack of reliable, comprehensive, and centralized accident data considerably limits the implementation of data-driven road safety strategies. Current data collection mechanisms suffer from insufficient coordination among the main stakeholders involved in road accident management, resulting in fragmented and inconsistent information that hinders the development of evidence-based public policies. This study aims to demonstrate the importance of systematic data collection, organization, and analysis for road traffic accident management in Senegal. The contribution also seeks to highlight the potential of open-source data for improving road safety analysis in data-scarce environments. To address this issue, open sources such as online media platforms and blogs were exploited to extract initially heterogeneous and unstructured accident-related information. The collected data were cleaned, standardized, organized, and georeferenced to ensure reliable analysis. Statistical analysis and spatial visualization techniques were then applied to identify accident trends and high-risk areas. The proposed approach made it possible to identify the main characteristics and trends of road accidents in Senegal, detect high-risk zones through georeferencing, and generate relevant statistical visualizations. The results demonstrate the feasibility and relevance of exploiting open-source data to support road safety analysis in contexts characterized by limited official datasets. The findings highlight the urgent need for proactive, integrated, and structured road accident data collection systems in Senegal. Such an approach would contribute to centralized information management, support evidence-based decisionmaking, improve road safety policies, and help reduce the socio-economic impacts of road traffic accidents.