Using data to improve road safety sounds like a good idea, but the devil is in the details.

We need data to make decisions about the effectiveness and efficiency of safety and other infrastructure improvement programs based on data. But we are consistently confronted by questions about data.

That could be the opener to many a mid-market company internal memos. Many of those companies are working on getting the right culture and infrastructure to transition to data-driven decision making. Well, except for the safety part. Typically in its place you would see something like sales maybe.

That’s because those lines actually come from the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA) Roadway Safety Data Program. The FHWA Office of Safety established the Roadway Safety Data Program (RSDP) to advance State and local safety data systems and safety data analysis and evaluation capabilities.

Some of the questions the RSDP grapples with have to do with the type and quantity of data to collect, the parties responsible for data collection, data management and integration, sharing data among departments/agencies, and the type of analysis to perform and tools to use.

These are just some of the big questions, and the FHWA is not the only one dealing with them.

The FHWA has some technical assistance programs designed to help agencies improve the quality of their roadway data. But is seems like the challenges are not met entirely in-house for Departments of Transportation (DOT) across the US. This is where 3rd party actors like Numetric come in.

Numetric’s mission is to empower traffic safety agencies to be more efficient and data-driven to make roadways safer. Numetric offers a suite of applications, as well as data preparation and data management services. Numetric works with many DOTs, and today is releasing an update to its Safety Analysis application. The application, Numetric says, reduces cost and time state and local agencies incur to make roadways safer.

The application uses roadway data provided by state and local agencies, and serves a list of recommended solutions based on built-in calculations pulled directly from the Highway Safety Manual (HSM). The HSM is a publication of the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials.

The HSM contains concepts, guidelines and algorithms for analyzing crash frequency prediction and is incorporated into every state’s roadway planning, design, operations and maintenance decisions. In a Q&A ZDNet had with Danny Anderson, Numetric VP of Product, we asked about the HSM and how it informs what Numetric does.

Anderson said that the engineers who developed HSM in the traffic safety space are always looking for improved ways of making the roadways safer, and Numetric uses these guiding principles of safety in its analysis. He pointed out that Numetric’s analysis does not only create crash-based analysis, but systemic analysis as well:

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