Insight Lane is looking for city partners to analyze road and crash data

An increase in bicycle sales, a reduction in commuting, families exploring their neighbors on evening walks — these are the unexpected side-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. A survey shows that some of these unintended habits will stick around after the pandemic is over. At Insight Lane, we hate covid but we love the diversification of road use. We are looking for city partners and civic tech contributors as we launch new features to support safer road networks.

Insight Lane is an open-source platform that assesses and visualizes crash risk across road networks. Started by a group of volunteers in 2017, its main goal is to inform and benefit residents and city governments for the purpose of improving car, bike and pedestrian infrastructure, using available data. We are data scientists, data engineers, and policy and advocacy nerds brought together by our belief in the use of data to inform planning of city streets, to achieve Vision Zero goals by reducing crashes, and to facilitate collaboration between cities, advocates and the general public.

The platform has a suite of features available and has been applied to cities including Boston, DC, Los Angeles and Melbourne, Australia. All a city needs to get up and running with the available features is crash data. We’d like to get these features in the hands of more cities, so we’re launching a pilot initiative to provide onboarding for any city with crash data. If you are a policymaker, advocate or just an interested citizen, fill out this form and we’ll work with you to set your city up on the platform.

Also if you’re interested in getting involved in the project, we’re looking to expand our group of volunteers. You might have twenty years of experience, or are looking for a way to apply your coding skills to a civic tech project. A lot of us ride bicycles, and also enjoy asking questions about equity, access to safe pedestrian options, and are curious about changes in crash patterns over time. We use a slack channel to organize and communicate, and work hard to support a collaborative and inclusive environment, no matter your skill level.

This project is fully open-source and all the code is available on Github.

If you are a future partner or contributor or both, we look forward to meeting you and making Insight Lane a resource for all.