California Tribal Road Safety Data Project: Methods, Challenges, and Preliminary Results

November 10, 2016

About the Seminar

This presentation will highlight a project that made recommendations for and provided data tools to facilitate improvements in collecting and using traffic injury data in and around tribal areas. In the initial phase of this project, traffic collisions in and around tribal areas were identified using California's Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System (SWITRS) and by exploring potential sources of data from other sources (e.g., tribal police, first responders, EMS). Analyses were developed for tribal road safety workshops and for individual tribes seeking road safety funding. One example is an extensive analysis that focused on road-departure collisions, one of the most frequent crash types on and around tribal lands.

The second phase of the project, currently under way, is focused on developing a Tribal Road Safety Tool in conjunction with the National Indian Justice Center. This tool will allow individual tribes to analyze SWITRS data relevant to their specific tribal area, add data from tribal police and/or first responders, and conduct analyses for improving road safety, including securing funding for that purpose. This phase will also include training tribal personnel in crash data collection and analysis.

Webcast

About the Speaker

David Ragland is the director of the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC) and an adjunct professor emeritus of epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include injuries in vulnerable road users, the interaction of behavioral and environmental factors in injury, and demographic/social/cultural factors in injury patterns.