The Power of Data and Collaboration to Improve Traffic Safety

According to the National Safety Council, traffic collisions cause more than 40,000 deaths and injure thousands of people every year across the United States. These are not traffic accidents, but entirely preventable tragedies.

Since cities in Sweden started the Vision Zero movement in the 1990s, many U.S. cities are now joining the effort as part of the Vision Zero Network, pledging to reduce traffic fatalities and injuries to zero in their communities.

With limited budgets and resources, these local city officials face a daunting question: what will it take to reach zero? Given the sheer number of factors that contribute to traffic collisions and the many potential interventions that might address them, where should a city focus its efforts?

This is where a little bit of math, a few cross-sector friendships and a healthy dose of data can be a game changer. We recently completed our first Labs project, in partnership with Microsoft and its Tech & Civic Engagement Group, after over a year of work and close collaboration with the cities of New York, Seattle and New Orleans. This was the first and largest multi-city, data-driven collaboration of its kind to support Vision Zero efforts within the U.S.

Leveraging newly-available datasets including open data, internal city data and data from private companies, our Labs team – Erin Akred, Michael Dowd, Jackie Weiser and Sina Kashuk – as well as dozens of DataKind volunteers have built models to help cities identify where there is greater risk of traffic collisions, built tools to empower city officials to test what safety interventions will be most effective on what streets, and even helped cities estimate total vehicle traffic volumes citywide when the data didn’t exist. All these insights, tools and methodologies enable city officials to better allocate resources, select the best safety interventions and focus their efforts to keep all road users safe.