Deaths and injuries are a major cost in transportation. Transportation fatalities rank third as the cause of lost years of life in the U.S. (behind heart disease and cancer). Several travel modes have death counts whose impact exceeds that of AIDS. But the Department of Transportation has not yet responded to this public health threat by developing data programs as capable as those used in the federal medical community. This plan aims to improve the quality of safety data programs throughout the Department of Transportation. Our principal model for improvement is the reporting system used by the National Institutes of Health to track and treat disease, and this requires better timeliness, comparability, accuracy, and coverage for transportation data. Our goal is to provide DOT with a new level of data quality, sufficient to identify, quantify, and minimise the risk factors in U.S. travel. This quality is essential to fact-based management of transportation safety programs. The Safety in Numbers project was developed in response to Secretary Slater’s 1999 National Transportation Safety Conference, where stakeholders identified better data collection and reporting across all jurisdictions as one of the top priorities to improve safety. Four Safety Data Workshops were convened in September and October 1999, and a national conference was held in April 2000, to gather input and develop an action plan for improving the quality of safety data. Over 200 stakeholders participated, representing the diverse interests of the transportation community such as non-profit organisations, associations, businesses, government (state, local, and federal), advocacy organisations, and academia. (A)
Samenvatting