USING DATA TO PREDICT CRASHES,
City aims for crash prevention
What’s better than quickly responding to a car crash? Preventing one before it ever happens.
In hopes of doing just that, Hub officials are preparing to take a data-driven approach to predict when and where crashes will happen and enact changes to keep them from occurring.
Andrew Therriault, the city’s chief data officer, said officials will soon combine their own records of car crashes with data they receive through a partnership with GPS app maker Waze and information from an online map where residents can report dangerous intersections to pinpoint problem areas.
“What we’d love to be able to do with them is come up with some measure of the dangers at each intersection,” Therriault said. “If we know we’re more likely to see crashes between motor vehicles and bicyclists in the places people are reporting that it’s hazardous for bicyclists we can connect that back to other places.”
In addition to identifying especially dangerous spots, Therriault said the city is looking to figure out which crashes are a result of poor street design and how best to prevent them. Using this approach, Therriault said he hopes that in the future, the city will be able to predict problem spots with enough accuracy that an extra traffic officer can be deployed to a certain area at a prime time for accidents — such as when it’s raining during rush hour, for example.
The city could also use the information to redesign crosswalks or intersections, Therriault said, or switch up the timing of certain streetlights.
The state-of-the-art prediction project comes after the unveiling of the newest version of the city’s open data website, Analyze Boston. The ultimate goal, the city says, is to let the public dive into the mountain of data the city produces but doesn’t currently have the resources to properly analyze.
“In Boston we don’t shy away from new technologies, we embrace them as we look for ways to better serve the residents of our city,” Mayor Martin J. Walsh said in a statement. “Building off of previous, successful models like CityScore and 311, Analyze Boston will make civic data easily available to all our residents.”
The city’s CityScore dashboard earned Boston national recognition. The data hub is designed to quickly show whether officials are meeting their goals on a given day, week, or year.