To reduce transportation system fatalities and serious injuries, timely, accurate, and accessible crash data is essential, as it allows for informed decision making, effectively educates users about the current state of Colorado’s transportation system relative to crash occurrence, and allows for resources to be directed toward key traffic safety concerns. The CDOT Crash Data Dashboard Advancement Project’s central goal is to create a new and improved public-facing CDOT Crash Data Dashboard that effectively meets the core needs of its key users in providing web-based query and report-building functions with interfaces for both external users and internal users, utilizing the CDOT BESDT crash data database as the central data source for the dashboard tool.
The core needs that the current CDOT Crash Data Dashboard does not effectively address are the following: 1) The ability to filter and subsequently download data from the dashboard for further analysis and subsequent decision-making or resource allocation, 2) Access to geolocated data for hot spot analysis and for the design of targeted countermeasures, 3) Integration with other types of transportation safety and crash-related data sources (e.g., Colorado State Patrol data or Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment data), 4) Access to a requisite amount of detail regarding the contextual events and behaviors that contribute to the occurrence of a crash (i.e., more graphs, tables, and better customization and filtering capabilities), and 5) Ease of navigation to the dashboard and understanding of the data and terminology within the dashboard.
