1. Making a Public Crash Data Repository Work for Traffic Safety Planners
Presented by Hilda Hardy
Institute for Traffic Safety Management & Research
University at Albany, State University of New York
August 10, 2016

2. Project Goal
To design and build a repository of crash data accessible via the internet to the:
Public
Traffic Safety Community
State & Local Agency Management
Research Community

3. Additional Project Objectives
Make data available in a more timely and efficient manner
Develop analytic & management reports that can be generated and printed online
Provide more specialized reports according to users’ requests
Make the system user-friendly and interactive; provide help tools
Design for expansion –
citation data
crash location data
Users are able to generate & print variety of reports, similar to summary reports that have historically been available – hold up copy of a paper report.

4. Traffic Safety Statistical Repository
System developed by ITSMR, a research center affiliated with the University at Albany, SUNY
Partnership with the Traffic Records Coordinating Council (TRCC)
Funded by the Governor’s Traffic Safety Committee (GTSC)
Url:
Discussions with folks at DMV, GTSC and DOT led to the suggestion that because of ITSMR’s long history of working with the crash data and fulfilling many of the data requests that were coming into DMV, let ITSMR build a crash data system that would address current needs.
Approved and being funded by GTSC under Section 405c .
TRCC and GTSC have been great partners in supporting this project.

5. Project Guidance and Direction
TSSR Technical & Users Advisory Group
Governor’s Traffic Safety Committee (GTSC)
NY State Police
NYS Dept of Motor Vehicles (DMV)
NYS Chiefs of Police
NYS Dept of Transportation (NYSDOT)
NYS Sheriffs Association
NYS Dept of Health (DOH)
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
NYC Dept of Transportation (NYCDOT)
Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA)
Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPO)
Federal Highway Administration (FHWA)
Early in project established the Technical & Users Advisory Group to provide guidance and direction to project development team
Includes representatives from these key agencies responsible for the data collection & use of the data
Have held multiple meetings since project began; one of its first activities was to set up small working groups to identify data fields to be included & determine standard & specialized reports needed;
Topics discussed by entire group included various policy issues related to data contained in system and their use
Want to give you a brief summary of the issues discussed and resulting policies

6. Project Design Governing Policies
What crash data should be included in the reporting data set?
All reportable crashes, police-reported crashes
How many years of data should be included?
A 10-year rolling set of “final” data, beginning with 2009 data
How often should preliminary data be refreshed?
Refresh data monthly; include only completed cases
DEF of Reportable crashes – governed by VTL –
F& PI
PDO over $1,000
Motorist
ITSMR typically pulls crash data on the 15th of each month; going forward more scrubbing will be done than previously done

7. TSSR – Overview of Project Design
Hardware – 2 dedicated Dell PowerEdge R730 servers
Software – SAS products
Step 1 – Extract crash data from AIS database
Step 2 – Maintain cleansed data in relational (transactional) database
Step 3 – Use an ETL tool to load data from relational database into data repository – SAS DataFlux Data Management Studio
Step 4 – Create data marts from data repository for query and reporting purposes – SAS Visual Analytics

8. Demonstration Crash Demo Folder
Many of the features in this demo are not yet available in our production environment; look for them in the next month or two.

9. The TSSR main page is a directory of all our reports
The TSSR main page is a directory of all our reports. It’s organized into 2 columns – statewide crash summary reports and county crash summary reports.
Reports are based on various traffic safety issues – Motorcycle, Pedestrian, Alcohol-Related, etc.
Help tools are in the upper right; the data snapshot date is shown at the bottom.

10. NYS Crash Summary, General Section
Tables show general crash numbers; use checkboxes to filter results.
Each report has several sections. The additional sections on Safety Equipment Use are examples of specialized tables created in response to users’ requests.

11. Most sections have corresponding charts, where we display 5 years of data by default.

12. Fatalities/Persons Injured Section – I can choose the year or years and the roles I’m interested in.

13. These are the corresponding charts for F & PI
These are the corresponding charts for F & PI. Selecting values in the chart legends allows me to filter other charts showing totals.

14. Driver Age and Gender – Here we have additional checkboxes for gender and age groups.

15. On the charts I can make selections to filter the results – here, F & PI crashes involving male drivers under the age of 30.

16. One useful feature of the tables is that the columns can be sorted in ascending or descending order.

17. The CF chart shows the top 8 Contributing Factors by default, though I can select any ones I’m interested in. Notice how the numbers change when I select Fatal only.

18. The charts on Safety Equipment Use show, for MV Occupants, Restraint Used, No Restraint Used, and Unknown. For Motorcyclists and Bicyclists, Helmet Used, No Helmet Used and Unknown.

19. The Alcohol-Related crash summary report has data similar to the NYS summary report.

20. For the section on Driver Age and Gender, we show numbers for drinking drivers and non-drinking drivers.

21. Again, for the charts I can select values in the checkboxes and the legends to filter the results.

23. The charts show distinctive patterns for A-R crashes – many more of them occur on Saturday and Sunday, and during the hours of 6pm – 6am.

24. By far the most common Contributing Factor for Alcohol-Related crashes, after Alcohol Involvement, is Unsafe Speed.

25. We have this section, crashes by month, for every report
We have this section, crashes by month, for every report. You can see that MC crashes are seasonal in NYS: more likely to occur during the months May-September.

26. Next Steps Add new reports – Young Driver, Older Driver, Impaired
Add citation data
Incorporate crash location data using GIS software

27. Thank you!
Hilda Hardy New York State Traffic Safety Statistical Repository: