Develop a Regional Multi-Source Database System for Safety Data Management and Analysis in RITI Communities in Washington State

Abstract

Rural, Isolated, Tribal, and Indigenous (RITI) communities across the United States are disadvantaged from a transportation safety perspective. Particular concern is focusing on rural road safety. Since RITI communities often do not have the capability and resources to sufficiently solve roadway safety problems, several challenges are encountered for addressing transportation safety issues in RITI communities, including: (1) Crashes are often distributed along roads in RITI areas without known patterns; (2) Strategies to address safety issues are diverse for different RITI communities and draw from several safety areas. As a result, there is a critical need to realize equitably-augmented safety solutions that address the needs of these underserved and underinvested RITI communities. To address this gap, this project aims to develop a regional multi-source database system for traffic safety data management and analysis of RITI communities in Washington State. The existing crash data sources in RITI communities in Washington was identified and documented. The crash data on rural routes was extracted from the raw data from Washington State Department of Transportation and integrated into the multi-source database system, including traffic flow characteristics, crash attributes and contribution factors, crash-related trauma data and medical records, weather conditions, etc. The Colville tribe also provided the crash data in their tribal communities under a confidentiality agreement. A multi-source database fusion and integration system architecture was designed. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 was used to implement the database and manage the data. A six-step data quality control method was employed to clean the data by wiping out the outliers from spatial and temporal aspects. The tribal crash data was made accessible to authorized users so they can download the datasets by using password, while the WSDOT crash data was set to be public for all the users. A safety analysis module was developed for visualizing the data in the regional multi-source database system in RITI communities. The data visualization platform is developed based on the Vaadin Framework. The users can interact with the interface for data analysis. A safety performance index and a potential safety improvement index were also developed. By combining the two indexes, one can easily identify crash hotspots and the key influencing factors to consider in an improvement package.