Geospatial Data Resources for Traffic & Safety Engineering

In recent decades, the United States has made notable strides in reducing roadway fatalities, largely due to improvements in transportation infrastructure and safety measures. However, road safety remains a persistent challenge. According to the US Department of Transportation (USDOT), the country's roadway fatality rate is still alarmingly high—three times greater than Ireland and Spain, and four to five times higher than the United Kingdom and Singapore. While final data for 2024 is still pending, the USDOT estimates that nearly 41,000 lives were tragically lost on US roads in 2023—serving as a stark reminder that the fight for safer roads is far from over.

In this blog, we will explore how Ecopia AI (Ecopia)’s cutting-edge geospatial data is supporting transportation safety programs across the nation, helping save lives and improve safety for all road users. 

Engineering safer roads: reducing risk and improving safety

Safety engineering teams within state departments of transportation (DOTs) are vital in preventing fatal and serious injury crashes on state and local roadways. Their mission is to protect all road users—drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists—by developing and implementing effective transportation safety policies, standards, and practices. By analyzing traffic patterns, crash data, and road user behavior, engineers can identify high-risk areas and safety concerns, allowing them to implement data-driven solutions that reduce the likelihood and severity of crashes.

Traffic and safety engineering teams oversee comprehensive safety programs, designing and implementing roadway improvements that enhance safety across the state. They also manage large-scale initiatives like the Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP), a federal program dedicated to significantly reducing traffic fatalities and serious injuries on public roads.

The HSIP relies heavily on the expertise of traffic and safety engineers to allocate funding and prioritize projects through a data-driven, strategic approach. Projects are selected based on crash data and proven crash reduction factors, ensuring that safety improvements are both impactful and precisely targeted. By using data-supported methods that take into account crash history, crash rates, and potential risk assessments, HSIP-funded initiatives focus resources on areas with the highest safety needs, all with the ultimate goal of achieving Vision Zero—eliminating traffic fatalities and serious injuries. 

Supporting traffic safety engineering with data-driven insights

The USDOT strongly promotes a data-driven approach to improving transportation safety, with traffic safety engineers playing a critical role in identifying and addressing high-risk areas on roadways. The process starts with analyzing crash statistics to highlight areas with significant safety concerns. Once these locations are identified, teams can evaluate various contributing factors such as lane configurations, intersection types, pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure, and the surrounding landscape. They also take into account key metrics like speed limits and annual average daily traffic (AADT) volume to better assess potential risks. The collected data is then fed into safety performance models to determine the most effective safety countermeasures.

Having access to the most current data is vital for traffic safety engineers to make informed, life-saving decisions that directly impact roadway safety. However, manually gathering this information can be both time-consuming and costly. With transportation networks constantly evolving, maintaining up-to-date data is a significant challenge. Fortunately, Ecopia's data offers an efficient solution, providing traffic safety engineers with detailed and accurate information quickly. This streamlines the process of evaluating and implementing safety countermeasures, ultimately saving time and resources while enhancing road safety.

How it works: transforming imagery into actionable data

Ecopia’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered systems extract highly precise transportation map geometry from the latest imagery, providing vectorized data of critical transportation infrastructure including roads, individual traffic lanes, intersections, sidewalks, crosswalks, and medians. This data is produced at scale, with the same level of accuracy you would expect from a GIS professional, eliminating the need for manual digitization. As a result, teams can quickly access the high-precision data necessary for analysis.

Conducting systemic safety screens

For example, Ecopia's comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date mapping data supports systemic safety screens, enabling teams to proactively assess intersections across the entire network. By leveraging crash data teams can identify the main variables and safety concerns and gain a comprehensive understanding of each intersection and its approaches, all accurately mapped by Ecopia. Once this data is in hand, teams can screen for similar intersection types across the state, allowing them to plan and prioritize safety improvements more effectively and strategically.

Implementing safety countermeasures

Beyond identifying where safety issues are occurring, Ecopia’s data also informs investment decisions on where to place countermeasures. Traffic and safety engineers can use this information to design and implement improvements such as better signage, traffic signals, guardrails, intersection modifications, roundabouts, and changes to road geometry, all aimed at improving road safety.

Analyzing transportation safety in Chicago with Ecopia’s data

Over the past decade, Ecopia has partnered with numerous states across the US to provide foundational transportation data. For example, Ecopia partnered with the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) to map advanced transportation and land cover features for metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) throughout the state, including the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP). Manually digitizing these features would have taken the MPOs thousands of hours, but Ecopia’s AI-powered technology was able to extract them in record time with the level of accuracy of a GIS professional. The 26 distinct features Ecopia provided—including individual traffic lanes, intersection controls, crosswalk types, turning lanes, medians, stop lines, and more—are helping to improve transportation safety across the state.

To understand traffic safety in the City of Chicago, Ecopia conducted an analysis that combined advanced transportation features extracted by our technology with crash data and US Census Bureau demographic information. The analysis highlights the importance of understanding the design of existing roads and surrounding infrastructure when selecting effective safety countermeasures. The full analysis can be explored here.

Where efficiency meets safety: enabling 45x faster mapping with Ecopia

Ecopia’s data also enables more efficient decision-making in San Bernardino County, the largest county in the US. Ecopia digitized the county’s entire transportation network 45x faster than previous manual digitization efforts, creating a 17-layer transportation feature database across 20,000+ square miles. When combined with crash data and AADT, this comprehensive inventory empowers transportation teams to quickly identify high-risk areas across their entire network and prioritize safety improvements. This accelerates decision-making and ensures resources are allocated where they’re needed most, ultimately reducing accidents and saving lives.

Driving safety with data-driven decisions

At Ecopia, we believe that safety and efficiency go hand-in-hand. To understand the causes of crashes and enhance road designs, it's crucial to have a clear, up-to-date view of the underlying infrastructure. With Ecopia’s data, teams gain that vital component, enabling real-time analysis and improved decision-making for safety improvements for all users.

Connect with our team to learn more about how Ecopia's advanced geospatial data can support your traffic and safety engineering projects today.