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More timely reporting of Idaho crashes
helps meet public and media expectations

Crash analysts at the Office of Highway Safety (OHS) have achieved a major milestone by eliminating a backlog of unprocessed crash reports. The group is completing their work on crashes from the second quarter of this year and will begin working on third-quarter crashes – this is the first time the group will be working on crash data from the current quarter.

This is the outcome of a years-long effort to reduce a lag from the time a crash report is submitted to OHS and when it is reviewed and input into ITD’s database for final analysis.

“This data is vitally important not only for ITD but it’s important for our partners at the local, county, and federal levels,” said OHS Law Enforcement Trainer Kirstin Weldin. “Reducing the lag in our data will allow everyone on Idaho’s roads to make safer decisions by giving us a clearer picture of what is happening in real-time.”

Getting to the current quarter with Idaho’s crash data has been a challenge. Each year, law enforcement agencies transmit nearly 30,000 crashes to OHS. In years past, delays in inputting these crashes have created a lag in providing a final crash report. Earlier this year, the 2018 Idaho crash report was finalized, just a few months later the 2019 crash report was published, now crash data for the first half of 2020 is nearly complete.

“This is great team effort not just from the crash analysts, but from several groups here at ITD as well as partners throughout the state,” Weldin said.

There are several factors that can contribute to delays getting crash reports ready for analysis. In 2016, a team from ITD’s Leadership Summit looked at ways to reduce the lag in data. Findings from this team resulted in a reprioritization of the way crashes are processed, an emphasis on keeping the team fully staffed, and an increased collaboration with GIS and ETS to better meet technological needs.

While it has taken some time to fully integrate the recommendations from the summit team, the hard work is paying off.

“I am just really proud to work with this team,” Weldin said. “They have been committed to getting this work done and reducing that backlog has allowed them to work more closely with our law-enforcement partners to improve the quality of these reports. At the end of the day, this work is about saving lives and this data will help us do that.”

Credit for expediting these safety statistics goes to the OHS crash-reporting team of Steve Rich, Kelly Campbell, Carrie Akers, Weldin, Patti Fanckboner, Julie Whistler, and Leslie De La Cruz.

Pictured below: The homepage image on the new Numetrics crash-reporting website, showing Idaho highway safety stats for years 2015-2019. The website address is: https://itd.numetric.net/itd-safety-dashboards#/.