Helping to Save Lives in Miami County, Kansas

Governor Persuaded to Widen "Killer 169" by the Power of GIS

Due in part to the power of maps rendered through ArcView GIS, the Governor of the State of Kansas felt compelled to schedule the widening of U.S. Highway 169 and directed that warning signs be installed immediately along the frequently traversed highway.

There is a two-lane, 20-mile stretch of U.S. Highway 169 that runs north-south through Miami County, Kansas, that precipitated 10 deaths in 10 months. This road is known to the State as U.S. Highway 169, but to the 8,000 drivers who travel it daily it is known as "Killer 169." Miami County is located 45 miles southwest of Kansas City, Kansas, and 81 miles southeast of Topeka. The County's eastern border falls against the State of Missouri and is due south of Johnson County, which is part of the greater Kansas City metropolitan area.

Due to the increasing number of fatalities on U.S. Highway 169 (more than 30 deaths since 1992), the 169 Task Force was formed in Paola, the County seat and a community tired of losing its citizens to an asphalt grave. Frank Kelly, Miami County sheriff and an active leader in the task force, approached the Land Information Management Office (LIMO), the County GIS and mapping office, to help design a map for the task force to present to Governor Bill Graves. Kelly felt that a map of the accidents occurring on U.S. Highway 169 from 1991-1997 would help to impress upon Governor Graves and the chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee the extreme anxiety and concern of the community.

LIMO accepted the challenge to create a map that would pinpoint the location of each accident. In 1997, the Miami County Highway Department obtained a grant from the Kansas Department of Transportation (KDOT) for a Trimble GPS Pathfinder Pro XR for road sign inventory. The decision was made to use the Trimble for location accuracy of each fatal accident. A Miami County sheriff and a GPS data collector went out for one day and collected the x,y coordinates of every fatal accident that occurred between 1991 and 1997. The County engineer who applied for the KDOT grant did the download and data correlation, converting the GPS points to a format readable by ArcView GIS.

LIMO received the data and began analyzing the road map and GPS points. On the eve of the day that the map was created, there were two more fatal accidents on U.S. Highway 169, taking the death toll to 12 deaths in 11 months.

The map created by LIMO was packed with mapping persuasions regarding Miami County's highway horrors in the hopes of impacting government officials. Sheriff Kelly could see the insight it would provide State officials. Kelly witnessed firsthand how powerful GIS can be, and he realized that this was the edge his department needed. Each GPS fatality point was connected to a database that contained accident dates, victims' names and injuries, officer on the scene, and various other data that would benefit the Sheriff's Department. This concept expanded into talk of "GPSing" burglaries, arsons, and robberies. Also, a discussion on using digital cameras to hot link crime scene photos for solving, referencing, and researching criminal actions and motives ensued. Considering the capabilities and visualizing the benefits of ArcView GIS, Kelly realized what an important aid it would be for the Sheriff's Department.

Miami County is currently using ArcInfo and ArcView GIS to build their County-wide GIS. ArcInfo and ArcView GIS are on a Sun Solaris SPARCstation 20 with a UNIX operating system. The County purchased a total of 14 licenses of ArcView GIS (Windows version), anticipating and visualizing every department in the County utilizing GIS at their desktops.

Miami County GIS, initially funded and intended for the Appraiser's Office, has sparked spatial ideas throughout the County and is starting to take root in other offices. LIMO is working with those departments to determine their spatial needs and is creating a design to help them meet those demands. LIMO is currently working with these departments: Appraiser, Highway, Engineering, Planning and Zoning, Sheriff, Noxious Weed, and the County Clerk.

Trying to accomplish all of the tasks of all these departments in-house has turned out to be a bigger project than LIMO imagined, but with the guidance of Rodney Sanders from M.J. Harden and Associates of Kansas City, an Esri Business Partner, the GIS portion of LIMO is on track.

In Miami County, GIS impacts many lives daily. The Sheriff's Department now can focus on new ways to prevent future fatalities by analyzing data with GIS. And, finally, families of the area will benefit when their loved ones can confidently travel a much-improved U.S. Highway 169.

For more information, contact Trisha Wildey Brush, GIS cartographer, or Deanna Hermreck, LIMO supervisor, Miami County LIMO, 201 South Pearl, Suite 201, Paola, Kansas 66071 (tel.: 913-294-9532, fax: 913-294-9545, E-mail: limo@micoks.net).

ArcNews home page