How Greater Data Accessibility is Driving New Jersey to Safer Roadways
As one of five elite academic research institutions sanctioned and supported by the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Rutgers Center for Advanced Infrastructure and Transportation (CAIT) is dedicated to tackling infrastructure issues—including roadway safety—head-on. This has put CAIT at the forefront of promoting safety on the streets and highways of its home state, New Jersey.
Access to data is making it possible for New Jersey’s municipalities, police departments, and transportation agencies to baseline and track their progress in meeting their roadway safety goals.
The Challenge
Difficulty sharing traffic and safety data between the state’s agencies was a problem for some time. To get a clear picture of how fatal crashes lined up with the state’s overall crashes, analysts had to manually combine CAIT’s crash data with the fatal crash data from the police. The usability of their tools was another barrier. A tool that CAIT had developed previously brought together the needed data, but its interface was prohibitively difficult to use.
The Solution
CAIT started working with Numetric in November of 2016, and they had a beta version ready to go by mid-January of 2017, which officially went live at the beginning of February.
The Benefits
Numetric has not only restored the access to the crash data these transportation safety analysts badly needed to better promote safety on New Jersey’s roadways—it has opened a world of new possibilities in terms of how quickly all of their stakeholders can access and visualize the data and how deeply they can dig into it.
“Numetric gets everyone fo “Numetric lets us take a data-driven approach to making our roadways safer. We can quickly pull these numbers and dive deep enough to get a real picture of what’s happening. The platform helps us not only see the data but act on it. “ cused around the same data so we can solve the same problems together.”
— Joseph Weiss, Safety Analyst, Rutgers University Center for Advanced Infrastructure and Transportation
