Abstract Road networks are by far the largest mobility infrastructure in Sub-Sahara Africa, and are key to providing access to economic and social opportunities. Yet the majority of road networks in Ghana and other countries in Sub-Sahara Africa are not geographically referenced, to facilitate their uses for road maintenance and management, transport planning, emergency services, disaster cases, logistics, tourism and other location based services. Consequently, this study takes advantage of paratransit service and the location of landmarks to provide location addressing of road networks in Ghana. The paratransit service, popularly known as Trotro in Ghana is a local transit system that uses an automobile to move people and goods along a prescribed travel route on a road network, with locally known stops where people get on and off the vehicle. The Trotro service is popular in Ghana, yet there is no critical investigation demonstrating its spatial coverage, relevance as a credible location addressing for road networks, or as a comprehensive location data for location based services. This study provides evidence for this case, and investigates the spatial coverage of road networks used by the Trotro vehicles, and the mapping of their service stops together with landmarks in the Asokore Mampong Municipality (AMM) of Ashanti region in Ghana. It was found that the location data from both Trotro service and landmarks covered about 86% of the entire road network in AMM; providing a large coverage of the road network and greater geographic detail. A service area estimation undertaken using the generated location data shows a high geographic accessibility, with travel distances as low as 160 m from any location to the nearest Trotro service or landmark covering about 80% of the road networks. These results show the capability of the generated location data to tackle the problem of spatially unreferenced road networks, and to significantly improve their effective uses. The popularity of paratransit in Sub-Sahara Africa means that this study can be adapted to other countries where the majority of the road networks are not spatially referenced.

中文翻译：

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Paratransit 案例 - “Trotro”服务数据作为加纳道路网络的可靠位置寻址

摘要 道路网络是撒哈拉以南非洲最大的交通基础设施，是提供经济和社会机会的关键。然而，加纳和撒哈拉以南非洲其他国家的大多数道路网络都没有地理参考，以促进它们用于道路维护和管理、运输规划、紧急服务、灾难案例、物流、旅游和其他基于位置的服务。因此，本研究利用辅助公交服务和地标的位置来提供加纳道路网络的位置寻址。Paratransit 服务，在加纳俗称 Trotro，是一种当地交通系统，它使用汽车在道路网络上沿着规定的旅行路线运送人和货物，在当地已知的站点供人们上下车。Trotro 服务在加纳很受欢迎，但没有重要的调查证明其空间覆盖范围、作为道路网络的可靠位置寻址的相关性，或作为基于位置的服务的综合位置数据。本研究为此案例提供了证据，并调查了 Trotro 车辆使用的道路网络的空间覆盖范围，以及它们的服务站与加纳阿散蒂地区 Asokore Mampong 市 (AMM) 的地标的映射。发现来自 Trotro 服务和地标的位置数据覆盖了 AMM 整个道路网络的约 86%；提供道路网络的大范围覆盖和更多的地理细节。使用生成的位置数据进行的服务区估计显示出较高的地理可达性，从任何位置到最近的 Trotro 服务或地标的行驶距离低至 160 m，覆盖了大约 80% 的道路网络。这些结果表明生成的位置数据能够解决空间未参考道路网络的问题，并显着提高其有效利用。辅助公交在撒哈拉以南非洲的普及意味着这项研究可以适用于大多数道路网络没有空间参考的其他国家。