With the large volume of vehicles on the road (and honestly, a disregard for basic traffic rules), traffic accidents just seem to be a fact of life in Quezon City—heck, in all of Metro Manila. I’ve borne witness to a number of them in the past month alone, seeing them happen in real time and not just the aftermath. However, beyond people saying, “Ah oo nga, madalas talaga ang aksidente sa lugar na yan,” what is lacking is actual data on where such accidents commonly occur. That’s why authors Mario G. Ugalino Jr., Jason Benedict B. Guillermo, Czar Jakiri S. Sarmiento, and Erica Erin E. Elazeguia from the Department of Geodetic Engineering, College of Engineering, University of the Philippines Diliman conducted a study on this very topic. Over 27 weeks, they used data from the Metro Manila Development Authority’s (MMDA) official Twitter account.
Accident locations were extracted from each tweet using natural language processing (NLP) techniques and were subjected to a set of spatial statistics to locate and map accident hotspots. Our analyses show that there is significant spatial clustering of traffic accident locations in Quezon City for the 27-week time series obtained. A stable hotspot was detected along EDSA North Avenue, a disappearing hotspot was found along Commonwealth Litex, and an emerging hotspot was observed along CP Garcia Avenue.
The research is from 2024, so perhaps there would be some changes in the results if it were conducted today, especially with the newly constructed island along Litex. I wish we had more information about their process and their findings, but the article is paywalled :/
