Virtual platform for improving coordination and promoting cooperation on traffic safety: towards a sense of community partnership and shared responsibility

Successful management of traffic safety requires effective community participation in the process of traffic awareness, planning and management along with the executive bodies concerned with traffic planning and management. Just as important to reinforcing a shared vision among people and management bodies is the idea of people participation in decision-making. There is a strong need for cooperation among traffic users, planners and managers. Traffic users play a significant role in running the traffic and have been vocal about management issues. Users should be encouraged to be as involved and active as possible in all decisions that affect their traffic safety. Community Corporations go further and encourage participation by forming user organizations. Encouraging user participation also requires training for oversight and conflict resolution, in order to work through unresolved problems. It is also as important that users should try out their ideas in an open exchange, see how the ideas fare; and hopefully, the best ones will survive and users learn through each other. Therefore, there is a great need to provide users, traffic planners and managers with a platform that fosters such activities and allows traffic users to discuss, report and document their views, events, experiences related to their traffic safety, i.e. report on faults, cracks, breakdown, damages, etc. Making a good use of such data can substantially assist in improving the operation and management of traffic safety. Virtual environments can provide traffic users, planners and managers with an atmosphere to participate in a computer generated world. Virtual environments run on multiple processes in which information are shared among processes. Traffic users, planners and managers will be able to visualize and navigate the virtual traffic modeled in distributed virtual environments. Traffic management is essential to achieve better reliability and availability of traffic safety. It is important to minimize the obstacles that will impact the successful achievement of traffic safety. This paper proposes a virtual platform for encouraging users' participation in traffic safety in terms of awareness, operation and management developed and to be implemented in an interactive 3D virtual environment. This virtual environment promotes multiple participants and can be remotely accessed synchronously by different users within 3D object-oriented virtual models while they are aware of the presence of others and communicate with them. This virtual environment encourages users, planners and managers to participate in fostering the sense of community partnership and shared responsibility, while traffic managers will benefit from the users' views.