Towards Performance Dashboards for Integrated Rural Public Health and Transportation Safety Decision Making: A Policy Leader Approach

Project summary:

The wide variety of safety initiatives, data collection efforts, research projects, and analyses conducted at the local, state, and national levels has made it difficult to aggregate and assemble transportation safety information in a way that is useful for policymakers and political leaders to make decisions. Policymakers must visualize and understand multifaceted data to see the overlap between behavioral and road engineering causes for crashes, capabilities to prevent and respond to crashes, and impacts (including costs) on community and public health systems. In order to address these needs, this project conducted a series of "best practices" case studies in states that have deployed decision-support information systems for informing safety policy. This project stemmed from a policy roundtable discussion in Washington, D.C. to identify critical information that state and national leaders and policymakers need to advance rural safety initiatives. Representatives of the U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials participated. The group's goal was to further refine the behavioral, technology, and policy research themes introduced at the first CERS Summer Institute, held in Duluth, Minnesota, in 2006. These case studies delved into the specific needs and requirements that policy decision makers would like to see in an electronic performance "dashboard" system, including key safety performance measures, data and information types, and visual presentation formats, with the goal of creating a system to visualize and present safety data for safety decision makers.