An Assessment of Road Network Quality in Jos City, Nigeria: Using Geographic Information System (GIS).
Given the significance of spatial data in planning, management and utilization of a road network in any society, the current study provides empirical spatial data on the road network of Jos city Centre, examine its quality, create a spatial and attribute database and analyzes its bearing on traffic flow situation. On-field data acquisition through measurement, observation and counting were used to collect information on the road network quality variables, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technique was used to digitize and in combination with the road network quality attributes used to produce a spatial and attribute database for the road network of the study area. The data were analyzed in Arc GIS 10.3 software environment. This provides an avenue for spatial querying of the various attributes of the streets. The result of the finding reveal that 3.91% of the road network are in good condition, 19.55% are fairly good, 51.40% are at an average condition, 23.44% are below average and 1.68% are under repairs. These have shown that the quality of roads in the study area can be termed to be at an average, this is fair, but not good enough to facilitate an excellent accessibility to the various socio economic activities within and around Jos City Centre and its environs. To improve the level of accessibility, the need for the upgrading of existing roads and construction of new roads so as to improve the efficacy of accessibility within the city Centre is essential.
