Education & Public Service

CMISST promotes sharing transportation data and research results to enhance the public safety. Working with the Michigan State Police through the Office of Highway Safety Planning, we make Michigan motor vehicle crash data available to transportation professionals and the general public via the award-winning Michigan Traffic Crash Facts website. Moving forward with further development of innovative tools and data sharing capabilities, CMISST wishes to expand upon this success.

The scientific community is increasingly espousing public access to data. The evolving power of technology offers an increasing number of very large, complex datasets, commonly referred to as “big data,” containing a wealth of information. This offers limitless potential for researchers to merge and compare seemingly disparate datasets to make new connections across disciplines.

The government is investigating and promoting new methods of data sharing and linkage. CMISST endeavors to parlay this momentum, creating a world-class repository of managed, integrated, broad-ranging datasets, and educating data owners and consumers on how to securely share data.

CMISST works with data controlled by different classes of exclusivity: protected private data, public data, and permission-restricted data. CMISST utilizes these datasets to solve pressing research issues by employing unique identifiers, redacting sensitive information, and aggregating the results.

Sample Dataset Analysis

Michigan Crash Fatality Trends

Figure 1. Long-range (left) and recent-years (right) views of Michigan crash fatalities over the last 50 years. The black line shows the year-to-year rise and fall in total fatalities. The green and red lines show two models of the underlying trends. Figure 1 shows the behavior of Michigan crash fatalities over the time period of 1940 to 2010 (on the left) and focused on 1999-2010 (on the right). The black lines are the observed fatalities for each year while the green line indicates the trend observed over this time period. Looking at the trend line, we can see that 2010 was actually quite close to the expected number of fatalities whereas 2009 is extremely atypical, particularly as the variations from year to year appear to be much smaller in the past decade than in previous decades. View the Full Report

Best Practices

Using Crash Datasets
Process for Generating Geospatial Crash Location
Data Collaboration and Linking
Collecting Crash Data