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Vision Zero is a multi-national road safety strategy that aims to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries while ensuring safe, healthy, and equitable mobility for all. The concept originated in Sweden in the late 1990s and has since been adopted by cities and countries worldwide. The central idea of Vision Zero is that traffic deaths and serious injuries are preventable, and that the transportation system should be designed with the safety of all users in mind. Vision Zero calls for a collaborative and data -driven approach. Additionally, the data, specifically the crash data, needs to be monitored to ensure that the road authority is making incremental progress towards the ultimate goal of zero fatalities and serious injuries.

Road authorities house their geocoded crash data obtained from law enforcement in various databases. The crash data are analyzed to identify trends and patterns, and then presented in a visually compelling format to be shared with stakeholders internally and externally. This process is time-consuming and cumbersome, especially for large jurisdictions with high volumes of crash data.

Data visualization is an effective tool for decision makers to identify problem areas, such as high-risk intersections or locations with a high incidence of crashes. With this knowledge, authorities can take targeted action to reduce the frequency and severity of crashes in these areas. Therefore, data visualization plays a crucial role in supporting Vision Zero efforts by providing insights to assist in improving transportation safety.

In repones to this need, Traffic Engineering Software (TES), a cloud-based premier data management and analysis software in traffic engineering and road safety, developed a platform which allows road authorities to input/import traffic crash data, analyze the data, and generate a dynamic Vision Zero Dashboard. The system can import crash data in various formats, including APIs, SQL database, XMLs, JSON, Excel, CSV, ArcGIS, and Access.

The TES Vision Zero Dashboard enables road authorities to track progress towards goals and identify trends, facilitating data-driven decisions that improve safety for all road users. It allows authorities to review the general trends of crash data in previous years based on severity for all road users, including vulnerable road users. It highlights the top road segments and intersections by frequency of crashes and shows them on the integrated map. The system also allows authorities to define emphasis areas based on their crash data and track their progress toward reducing the frequency and severity of crashes within those emphasis areas. Moreover, it enables authorities to compare progress between different time periods, providing insight into the effectiveness of different strategies and initiatives. It also integrates with ArcGIS maps and provides a visual representation of crash data in a heat-map format, allowing decision makers to identify problem areas.

The TES Vision Zero Dashboard is a comprehensive and detailed presentation of various crash-related aspects. This includes frequency of crashes by year, month, day of the week, hour of the day, traffic control, driver action, driver condition, weather condition, illumination, age, gender, road condition, initial impact type, and speed. These charts can plot all types of crashes or be filtered to only show those involving pedestrians or cyclists. This provides a thorough overview of the authority’s road safety performance.

Easily view historical crash data with flexible filtering	Emphasis Areas

Comparison of emphasis areas between two time periods	Heat map of locations with high frequency of crashes

TES Cloud (www.tes.ca) provides several other functionalities including managing volume, speed, classification data, estimation and prediction of Average Annual Daily Traffic (AADT), and the full life cycle of road safety management projects from network screening using Highway Safety Manual (HSM) methodologies to economic appraisal. The software can run various warrants such as traffic signal warrants and generate reports, charts, and graphs.

The increasing availability of data in the field of road safety and traffic engineering has necessitated the use of a robust software package to effectively manage and analyze this wealth of information regardless of the size of the road authority. Such a software package can integrate all the key traffic and road safety data, so staff can easily access the data associated with an intersection or road section. A software package similar to TES can help staff to focus on improving safety and mobility of their transportation network instead of hunting for data in different spreadsheets, GIS files, and file cabinets before conducting their analysis.