Data is key to understanding and improving safety: road safety audits, more efficient data collection, and a new software tool promise to make our highways safer

Public Roads, Jan-Feb, 2003 by Michael S. Griffith, Carl Hayden, Hari Kalla

Before the dawn of the Information Age and the invention of the computer, safety leaders recognized the need for data on highway traffic crashes as early as the 1920s. A national conference on Street and highway safety, held in 1924 in Washington, DC, reported, "Statistics regarding street and highway accidents are so vital to any comprehensive understanding and treatment of the safety problem that their collection and analysis in every State and community are essential." This statement still rings true; it might be even more important considering the interconnected local, State, and Federal transportation and other systems.

By the end of the 20th century, every State and local government had the mechanisms to collect highway crash data. What safety professionals know today is that a number of ever-changing variables factor into the frequency and severity of crashes: travel mode, the road and roadway conditions, type of vehicle, weather, amount of travel, terrain, and most uncontrollable of all, peoples' behavior. Now, the safety community is looking for the links and correlations among all these factors as it builds better and more accurate safety prediction models. These models will be used by decisionmakers, designers, and planners, to make choices about and implement a safer transportation and highway system.

The amount and quality of available data are key components for improving highway safety performance. The continuing challenge at this junction is gathering complete and accurate data, and making it more accessible and easier-to-use for transportation leaders and decisionmakers. The good news is that data collection tools are improving; road safety audits are now available for tapping into safety knowledge; and a new software resource-SafetyAnalyst--is under development.

Filling in the Data Gaps

Although data collection is improving, there are still processing inefficiencies that can impact overall decisions about safety. Not all regional areas have access to the same levels of the latest technology. For example, many law enforcement personnel complete and file paper copies of crash reports and investigations, which are forwarded through an organizational chain for processing. Multiple agencies then manually key in selected data fields at multiple levels of government (local, State, and Federal). Not only does this create duplicative efforts, but it also opens the door for potential data entry errors and missing data at one or more organizations. Incomplete data with crucial elements missing, unavailable, or not capable of being combined for analysis could make the difference in designing and building a safer road or bridge.

Today, the maturity of computer technology makes it practical to collect, edit, distribute, and store data in electronic format with little or no additional manual processing necessary. New technologies make it possible to collect agency-specific data more efficiently and to share it across multiple programs. Further, integrating data from various agencies is now possible, including police crash reports, truck inspections, traffic citations, motor vehicle records, emergency medical services (EMS) run reports, emergency and long-term health care records, highway inventories, and traffic volume records.

The transportation safety community and other organizations could benefit by stepping back and viewing how data is or might be used, how it is gathered, and the components that are necessary for making life-saving safety models. Finding mechanisms for sharing information vertically and horizontally within an organization, and finding ways to share accurate and complete data among local, State, and Federal agencies could have a profound effect on decisionmaking and safety across the Nation.

National Model

This integration is being done under the National Model for the Statewide Application of Data Collection and Management Technology in Highway Safety project. The National Model is a Federal-State partnership to demonstrate the successful integration of technology for the improvement of public safety. The partnership, which originated in 1997, includes the Iowa Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), and Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

The National Model is designed to be adaptable for use by a wide range of government agencies, such as law enforcement, EMS teams, motor carrier inspectors, and others collecting incident-based safety data. By enabling an in-vehicle hardware unit to function as both a mobile data terminal to communicate with the computer-aided dispatching (CAD) system and as the unit for field-based reporting, the system provides a more efficient means of collecting accurate and timely crash data.

The National Model also is capable of incorporating multiple field-based reporting areas, such as motor carrier safety inspections, citations, Implied Consent (DUI) forms, and incident/crash reports. Data and images are transmitted from both local and State law enforcement agencies to administrative offices in order to eliminate redundant data entry and expedite data processing. Finally, the National Model increases the efficiency of distributing and analyzing safety data by providing accurate data to the user community in hours instead of days and weeks.