Idaho Crash Data
tells "the story of our roads"

When we think of highway safety, we might think of a campaign of public safety announcements encouraging people to buckle up. We might think of the police getting drunk drivers off the roads. Or it could be a project to improve safety for kids walking to the neighborhood school. The common theme through all of these safety activities is compelling data. 

ITD has many different datasets, but one of the most telling sets is our crash data. It helps us understand who is crashing, where they’re crashing, and why they’re crashing.  

The Office of Highway Safety (OHS) has a small but dedicated team that collects and inputs crash data from all across Idaho. Between 2015 and 2019, they processed 126,243 crash reports – 27,015 of those crash reports were from last year alone.  

“Our crash analysts are the unsung heroes of highway safety,” said OHS Manager John Tomlinson. “The work they do isn’t easy, but it’s the foundation of our highway safety program.” 

Whenever a crash results in property damage or an injury on a public road, the responding law enforcement officer creates a report. Each report can contain up to 247 unique data elements which are reviewed and added to ITD’s crash database. Once all the crashes are inputted, a team analyzes and interprets the information for ITD’s annual crash report.  

Read 2019 Idaho Crash Report. 

“This report is vital to our program as we share it with our federal, state, and local partners,” Tomlinson said. “It tells the story of our roads, and when we understand what is happening on our roads, we can take specific actions to improve safety.” 

Tomlinson said those actions aren’t limited to transportation or traffic safety professionals.  It’s something that can help drivers make safer decisions on the roads. That is why OHS has partnered with Numetric, a company that specializes in data visualization, to improve data accessibility. 

The new crash dashboards allow users to create custom searches of ITD’s crash data to help them understand the traffic issues that are important to them. Users can look at dashboards showing different driving behaviors and how they impact the state as a whole, their county, or their city. A filter has even been added to allow parents to look at crash data around their child's school. 

“This is about empowering people to make safe choices,” Tomlinson said. “Our crash team puts in a lot of hours on these reports. Our goal was to improve the user experience with this data so we might help people better understand the road environment so they can do their part to keep our roads safe.”

Published 08-14-20