Maryland drivers (and nervous parents) now have a resource that tracks crashes on the roads thanks to a new statewide crash data dashboard.
Launched by the Maryland Department of Transportation Motor Vehicle Administration’s Highway Safety Office (MHSO), the new dashboard uses the crash information to identify trends and shape safety initiatives for the future.
The information includes crashes across Maryland that result in serious injuries and will exist alongside MHSO’s Fatal Crash Data Dashboard, which provides data on fatal crashes. Taken together, the dashboards give Marylanders tools to understand crash trends and give safety advocates important data in their efforts to make the state’s roads safer.
“Access to comprehensive crash data is essential as we work with the public, safety partners and decisionmakers to reach our goal of zero roadway fatalities in Maryland,” said Chrissy Nizer, Motor Vehicle Administrator. “This new dashboard will help identify crash trends, including those resulting in serious injuries, and use that information to improve their behavior on Maryland roads, prevent crashes and save lives.”
Nizer also serves as Gov. Wes Moore’s Highway Safety Representative.
MHSO and Maryland State Police (MSP) collaborated to create the new crash data dashboard, which uses the MSP Automated Crash Reporting System and the MSP Data Warehouse to create its analysis.
The new dashboard’s features include:
- Interactive Data Broken Down by Crash Severity, Time Period, and Jurisdiction: A heatmap provides a visualization of overall crash data, and all data subsets may be broken out by year, month and jurisdiction.
- Daily Updates: The dashboard will be updated daily, providing timely access to statewide crash data across all severity levels.
- Additional Crash Characteristics: The dashboard makes it easy to explore crash details, including driver behaviors, the severity of injuries and crashes involving non-motorists.
- Emphasis Areas: Expanding beyond fatal crash numbers, the emphasis area filters along the left-hand side of each page allow users to summarize data by driver behaviors, non-motorist involvement or work zone located incidents.
The dashboard has a section for Crash Data Definitions that outlines details on injury severity, emphasis areas, and more. The dashboard will be updated every morning, but since reports and investigations go on for days and are often updated, the data may change over time.
Not every data point will be tracked on the dashboard. In certain cases, there may be an unknown time listed in the case of property-damage-only crashes where the incident time is not known. Users will not be able to ask about crashes at a specific location, either. The current dashboard does not offer a filter by road names, though crash data with road names and GPS coordinates are available through the MDSP public dashboard applications.
