Completing the picture of traffic injuries: Understanding data needs and opportunities for road safety [R4]

Police-recorded crash data has improved over time, but still fails to report all aspects of crashes that are important to developing a full understanding of crash mechanisms, injury burdens, pre-crash conditions, and ultimately total health and cost outcomes. Traditionally, safety and injury analysis has occurred in siloed fields, with road safety researchers relying predominately on police-recorded crash reports, and public health researchers relying on hospitalization records. Depending on the context of the study and the database used, findings vary. This is the case for the micro-level (e.g., injury severity of an individual) to the macro-level (e.g., injury rate) scale. This project begins to map disparate data sets to inform questions surrounding crashes. The data-mapping process will aim to build linkages between police-crash datasets and other datasets (i.e., incident-oriented data, spatial data, emerging datasets) and scale it up to larger geographic areas. Efforts to augment crash data are not new. A notable health-oriented example which sought to link health and police records was the Crash Outcome Data Evaluation System (CODES). Although this federal program ended in 2013, some states, including California, North Carolina, and Tennessee, have continued this effort. Added data and analytics resulted in a more “complete picture” of crashes and injuries. This complete picture enables researchers to improve their modeling, assist policy makers, and contribute to visualization that helps tell compelling safety stories that guide safety improvements.