Identifying High Frequency Crash locations: Empowering End-users with GIS Capabilities

by randy K. smith, andrew J. graettinger, ph.d., Kerri Keith and allen parrish introduction The ability of transportation and traffic safety engineers to efficiently and effectively deploy available resources is dependent on their ability to quickly and accurately evaluate existing information. Varied research has indicated the important role geographical information systems (GIS) can play in helping traffic safety professionals make these decisions.1,2,3 Unfortunately, the widespread adoption of GIS beyond the enclaves of specialized GIS departments or groups is hindered by collecting crash and geographic data, verifying and aggregating the data, 4–6 statistically processing the data7,8 and the complexity of most GIS platforms.9,10 Therefore, considerable attention is needed to provide end-users of traffic crash data (traffic safety professionals, transportation engineers and state and federal policy-makers) with straightforward and intuitive access to the capabilities of GIS.11 This work was a major effort by the University of Alabama in collaboration with the Alabama Department of Transportation, the Alabama Department of Public Safety and the U.S. Department of Transportation to provide these types of users with access to GIS capabilities. The primary goal of this effort is to empower safety engineers with rich statistical and filtering capabilities coupled with a seamless transition to the power and capabilities available in modern GIS. The approach leverages the existing ondemand filtering and statistical capabilities of the Critical Analysis and Reporting Environment (CARE) as a statistical processing engine and the mapping capabilities of ESRI Software’s ArcGIS application.12,13 The project seeks to: • Improve the efficiency and application of resources to reduce traffic crashes; • Directly provide decision-makers with visual assistance in identifying and analyzing high accident locations; and • Refrain from increasing the workloads on already strained state GIS offices.