Help improve safety in your community! Share stories on Street Story of where you've been in a crash or near miss, or where you feel safe or unsafe traveling.
Last week, during the California-wide PedsCount! Summit, we launched Street Story, SafeTREC’s new community engagement platform that allows residents, community groups and agencies to collect information about transportation collisions, near-misses, general hazards and safe locations to travel. In essence, the platform invites users to enter stories about travel experiences.
Low-income groups, people with disabilities, seniors, and communities of color are at higher risk of being injured while walking and biking. Information on the safety needs of these groups is also limited.
Crash data is readily available and accessible for public use through government information databases. Crash data typically entails vehicle-related injuries and fatalities that were reported to police authorities. But what about unreported incidents--incidents that only require exchange of contact and insurance information, incidents that may not involve an injury or injuries that might not have been reported?
The California Young Driver Heat Map (Teen Safety Heat Map), a new geographic information system (GIS) resource developed by SafeTREC in partnership with the California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) was recently highlighted in the Winter, 2017-2018 issue of the California Department of Education's CDE Driver Education Update.
The Transportation Injury Mapping System (TIMS) has been developed by SafeTREC's GIS Program team to provide quick, easy and free access to California crash data that has been geo-coded to make it easy to map out crashes and even view the locations in Google Street View.
The following tools are currently available on TIMS:
Since 2009, UC Berkeley SafeTREC and California Walks (Cal Walks) have partnered together on the Community Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Training (CPBST) program to train local neighborhood residents and safety advocates on how to improve pedestrian and bicycle safety and strengthen their collaboration with local officials and agency staff to make their communities safer and more pleasant to walk and bike.
Collision geocoding is the process of assigning geographic descriptors, usually latitude and longitude coordinates, to a traffic collision record. On California police reports, relative collision location is recorded using a highway postmile marker or a street intersection. The objective of this study was to create a geocoded database of all police-reported, fatal and severe injury collisions in the California Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System (SWITRS) for years 1997-2006 for use by public agencies.
