Open Data Helps Make the Streets Safer for Everyone
In 2014, the City of Pittsburgh, in partnership with the Allegheny County and the University of Pittsburgh, began to make City data open and accessible to everyone. Our regional open data platform, Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center, currently houses over 250 data sets. As part of the Open Data effort, we’ve reached out to different Pittsburgh residents, community groups, non-profits, and researchers to see how they have been using this data to improve Pittsburgh.
Eric Boerer is the Advocacy Director at Bike Pittsburgh, an advocacy organization for bicyclists and pedestrians in the city. Bike Pittsburgh’s recent Crash Report used City data to highlight key streets and intersections for traffic interventions and gave a snapshot of basic crash statistics.
What is Bike Pittsburgh?
Bike Pittsburgh is an organization focused on transforming our streets and communities into vibrant, healthy places by making them safe and accessible for everyone to bike and walk. We are involved with advocacy, community engagement and education regarding biking and walking in the city.
What do you do here?
I am the Advocacy Director and I mostly work with the City and communities to advocate for and implement infrastructure change. For example, we worked with the City on the Complete Streets policy last year.
What is the Complete Streets policy?
Complete Streets is based on the idea that our streets should be safe and accessible for everyone, regardless of age, ability, or way they get around. We need to think about our streets as transportation corridors for all people — not just cars. The contrast to that are incomplete streets, which are designed with cars as the primary users. This Complete Streets policy makes sure designers and city planners keep all users in mind while they are redesigning streets. For example, when the City is repaving, the planners would have to rethink whether or not a street is maximized for everyone. If you think about it, streets are one of the largest public spaces in any city.
Why is the City’s open data important?
We need data to understand how the streets are functioning, where are they are working, and where they are failing. Are there patterns for where crashes occur? That would indicate a spot where we should concentrate our efforts. How can we as an advocacy organization be most efficient about reducing harm? In addition to targeting problem intersections, we have been working with the City on different bike infrastructure projects and we would like to see if they are successful and maybe identify where improvements could be made. Can we support further investments for more bike lanes and infrastructure? To do so, we need data to justify spending on these safety measures and show how the improvements we’ve made have increased street safety levels.
One of the earliest bike lanes projects we worked on was East Liberty Boulevard. In 2008, we worked on what’s called a “road diet,” where the street was right-sized and gave people more options to transport themselves on the street. This was done by taking a fast moving, four lane road, and reducing it to two car lanes, two bike lanes, and two parking lanes. As a result, car crashes and pedestrian car crashes went down. Bike lanes don’t just help bicyclists; they can often make the streets safer by slowing them down and making them more predictable.
How have you been using the City’s open data to help your cause?
Before the City started releasing its data on the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center (WPRDC), crash data was notoriously difficult to acquire. All the data was housed at the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. When we requested the data from them, we had to be incredibly specific with what data we were requesting. Simple questions like “how many pedestrians are killed in accident every year?” were difficult to answer. You wouldn’t get the exact locations and it was incredibly hard to map out the crashes. The crash data we can access now is more specific and the locations are included. It’s become a powerful means for us to understand the prevalence of crashes on our street and allowed us to create our Crash Report for 2011 to 2015.
What is the Crash Report?
When Allegheny County and the City of Pittsburgh released crash data from 2006 to 2014 on the WPRDC, we used the data, which has geolocation tied to the intersection where the crash happened, to map out the most frequent crash areas. We also incorporated statistics for the most common reasons for crashes whether its speeding, distracted driving, aggressive driving, or any number of other reasons. This report allows us to better understand how our streets are performing and serving our safety needs. Many U.S. cities are working with their respective local governments to reduce all traffic fatalities to zero and we would like Pittsburgh to adopt this goal as well. An important part of this is understanding the state of crashes and accidents right now and set the baseline for improvement in the future.
What has the response been to the report?
The city has been using it for planning. The Mayor tweeted about it. People want to know what the current state of traffic safety is in Pittsburgh. Now that everything is mapped, we can identify hot spots to see where we should target interventions.
What are specific interventions we can use to reduce crashes?
First, we need to identify the main cause of crashes in a particular area using data. Is it bad lighting, distracted driving, a confusing intersection, speeding, or something else entirely? Usually traffic calming is the most common intervention and this can be done in a myriad of ways.
Human beings are fallible; they make mistakes. But these mistakes shouldn’t be deadly. We should be engineering our streets in a way that is not fatal. We focus on built-environment changes such as putting in lights, lengthening crossing times, pulling parking back, putting in speed bumps, and putting in bike lanes. These all work to make our streets safer.
This is a profile from our Open Data Progress Report. Check back next week to see the full report! In the meantime, you can take a look at the City’s open data on Burgh’s Eye View — and see other datasets on the regional data center!
