Abstract
There were nearly 6.3 million traffic crashes reported in the United States in 2015, and vehicle crashes resulted in over 2.4 million injuries and 35,485 fatalities. In the Pacific Northwest, there were 1231 fatalities on public roads in 2015. The documentation process for every crash begins at the scene of the incident with information gathered by a member of the law enforcement community or by the private citizen(s) involved in the crash. This information is subsequently transmitted to a local or state agency for data entry, processing, and aggregation for the purpose of future analysis. Given the sheer volume of incidents and the requirement of multiple handoffs between different stakeholders, the likelihood for transmission error and interpretation deviation necessitate a comprehensive cradle-to-grave examination of this reporting process in the Pacific Northwest. Furthermore, each state has developed its own independent tracking system, thereby rendering data comparisons across state boundaries to be inconsistent. This reality presents a barrier to strategic safety planning on a regional scale. These collective issues justify the need to examine crash reporting and identify a process where data entry is streamlined to best meet the needs of all system users, including: law enforcement, local and state agency data analysts, national and state agency safety offices, and researchers and academicians who must rely on good data to draw conclusions and recommend purposeful safety improvements.
The objectives for this project specifically responded to current gaps in research and identified a methodology to benefit system users: fully document the crash reporting process in the Pacific Northwest (Alaska, Washington, Idaho, and Oregon) and identify the differences that exist, determine where the introduction of errors occurs in each state’s reporting process, and what the root causes of those errors are; and develop a reporting process that minimizes the introduction of errors while maximizing the robustness of crash archives.
The availability of consistent, high quality data will support regional transportation safety decision-making, a critical resource not currently available in the Pacific Northwest.