Moving beyond crash data to improve road safety

Moving beyond crash data to improve road safety

The USDOT’s Safe Streets For All (SS4A) program was established by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to provide funding to local and regional governments for the development of plans, or the implementation of those plans, that advance the Safe System approach to road safety planning.

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Unlike traditional road safety methods, the Safe System approach starts with the assumptions that people will make mistakes, and that it is important to design roads with human limitations in mind. Knowing that individuals will mess up now and then, it makes sense to take a proactive approach to identifying and addressing risks before crashes occur.
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Given that most transportation planners use historic crashes as a starting point for assessing road risk, the traditional road safety planning approach is intrinsically reactive, not proactive. The question, then, is what tools do planners have to make their work forward-looking?

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The answer, in one word, is data.

As I recently discussed in a webinar with Jesse McGowan from Sam Schwartz, there is huge range of data available to transportation planners to assist with road safety analyses, including:

• Qualitative 
• Built Environment
• Demographics
• Pedestrian/bicyclist activity
• Telematics

Data can be immensely helpful for identifying location trends among crashes, prioritizing areas for improvements, substantiating anecdotal data, and tracking changes over time. But more data isn’t always the key. It’s also about getting smarter, more timely data. Local governments are already awash in vast data resources, but some of those data sets are either reported in a laggard or incomplete fashion (such as crash data), or require significant manual effort to collect (such as pedestrian counts or road condition reports).

The good news for transportation planners is that in the current era of internet-connected devices and vehicles, a whole industry has emerged to provide data from “smart” devices. These data points may be generated by a phone-based app or a car with built-in telemetry trackers, or by sensors attached to infrastructure.

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At Vianova, we produce our own road safety-focused data tool - Risk Aware. Our solution includes aggregated driver behavior data points derived from vehicles and apps, along with data on pedestrian volumes and other context-appropriate data sets to provide our customers with a risk score for every road segment and intersection in a region. 

What sets Risk Aware apart is that it can provide near-real time updates on driver and pedestrian behavior.  Planners, in turn, have a clear view into the changing dynamics on their roads, and rapid feedback on the impact of their interventions.

While data is abundant, it can also be expensive. The good news is that the SS4A grant program makes these kinds of emerging tools more accessible to transportation safety planners. 

Whether you want to better understand the risk in your road network today, or track the impact of your road safety projects over time, Vianova can help. If you are interested in getting our support for a road safety grant application, click here.