Strong towns report on their crash Analysis studio project

[Winston Lumpkins]

Myles brought up the Crash Analysis studio at our goal setting meeting, which spurred this research into it... 

The crash studio homepage:

https://www.strongtowns.org/crashstudio

The report from 2024:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1euyanrfu2fBreXgo3byHYyjeN7Mc2t8i/view

The report is worth a read or skim.  

When it comes to traffic safety, the sort of number one problem that's driving me insane is that we do nothing to prevent future crashes when a crash occurs.   My sanity erodes further every time someone is injured or killed by predictable crashes...

I'm not the only person to be bothered by this lack of action, which is not unique to Portland; Strong Towns has been working on it for a few years.  

They've developed this tool/ skill set/ program called crash analysis studio- here's a quote saying it better than I can: 

The medical profession uses clinical mortality reviews to study and learn from adverse outcomes. The National Transportation Safety Board has a similar commitment to study each plane crash. Yet, despite the level of urgency, there is no institutional response to gain insight from automobile crashes.   

This is not because there is nothing to learn. And it’s not because we lack the capacity to conduct this kind of review. The most immediate obstacle to action is the lack of an established practice for analyzing and learning from fatal car crashes.

They've set out to create that established practice; their report details their findings and recommendations having tested that practice on 18 public sessions studying crashes from around the US, with local and recurring, strong towns related folks taking part in them.   

They also found some things which seem to be contributing to many of these crashes...  High speed design in urban areas, dangerous intersections design, and designs that deviate from the engineers plans/intent, among others.  Those factors are covered in detail in the report.  

Their number one recommendation is that there should be someone very high up in the cities organizational chart who is vested with traffic safety; reporting directly to the city council.  

I think we should be incorporating some of this into our goals.  

Check it out.  

~Winston

Winston Lumpkins IV (he/him/his)

Past Chair, Portland Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Committee
https://www.portlandbikeped.org/

winston....@gmail.com
207-408-1508

• 
  

[Rauschpfeife]

The idea of a Crash Studio seems like an excellent one. I'd put the idea in a somewhat blunter way: crashes need to be looked into more deeply than the police are currently inclined to do, so those of us who take an interest will have to do it ourselves. As Winston says, there are some general conclusions that come to mind pretty quickly after only a modest amount of digging. And a whole family of questions that usually go un-asked. Like for example, how fast was the driver actually going? 

After an airplane crash, the NTSB does some very thorough forensic work. After somebody on foot or on a bike gets killed by a driver, officialdom generally just endorses the driver's story. 

One advantage of an *official* existence for the crash studio is that the cops would have to disgorge more information to it than they now like to do. And of course, with some kind of official standing, uncomfortable questions could be asked without being shrugged off. 

Relatedly (I hope) I've been tinkering with my own open-source version of the Maine DOT crash map: 

http://crashes.smithbowen.net/portland_crashes/

It now has clustering (and boy, do the clusters tell a tale).  The clusters resolve as you zoom in. I've included all bike and ped crashes, with or without death or serious injury, on the basis that more data points are better than fewer, and if even non-serious crashes occur more frequently in a particular place, maybe that place needs some attention. Of course, the fact that a crash was serious enough to report at all suggests that it probably wasn't trivial. 

Non-serious and non-fatal markers are green, serious injuries blue, deaths red. The popup on each marker is also now a bit more informative. 

Still no word from the Maine DOT GIS folks on direct access to the raw data. 

-- 

Best, 

Michael Smith

anacharsis.substack.com

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Portland Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to PBPAC+un...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/PBPAC/CABaJc7zLmkPMLh_%2B%3DVkOb-94nxyymCmvLu_3X5WvfJ-R9KpNjw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Scsmedia]

I am going to disagree with one part of your essay.

This is not because there is nothing to learn. And it’s not because we lack the capacity to conduct this kind of review. The most immediate obstacle to action is the lack of an established practice for analyzing and learning from fatal car crashes.

The automobile manufacturers and the insurance industry have been studying car crashes for about 125 years.  They have focused on what happens to the car and its occupants.  This is well known and documented.  They do not study what happens to people cars crash into.

Why, because they have never been sued for it (I am sure there have been suits that have been settled out of court), so it is not a priority for them.

Steven Scharf

207-415-4662

SCSM...@aol.com