Moving Beyond Crash Statistics to Understand Road Safety

In a piece in Next STL, Christian Frommelt argues that planners and transportation officials shouldn’t rely exclusively on crash statistics to understand road safety conditions in their cities. “We need metrics that keep us accountable and crash data alone is inadequate in implementing serious, sweeping change.”

For Frommelt, “Measuring modal share—the proportion of people walking/rolling, biking, taking public transit, and driving—will help determine whether car-dominant planning continues to supplant overall health and safety.” Moreover, Census data only shows modal share for commutes to work, obscuring the many other types of trips that people take to grocery stores, schools, healthcare facilities, entertainment venues, parks, and more.

In St. Louis, where Frommelt lives, a new Complete Streets bill could help the city gather more information about those metrics and assess how infrastructure investments are paying off for pedestrians, cyclists, and other road users. Measuring mode share more accurately can also unlock federal funding opportunities.