It wasn’t that long ago that transportation professionals in local and state agencies had to sift through piles of paper crash data reports to pull out those key data that they could analyze to make smart decisions about road safety.

Over the past decade, data analysis technology has improved exponentially.

The Michigan Department of Transportation is a prime example of an agency that has integrated crash and roadway data across all levels of government in the state, according to a recent article written by Volpe and Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) staff in FHWA’s Public Roads magazine.

“Through a combination of forward-thinking leadership, partnership with law enforcement, and technological advances, crash data in Michigan today is exchanged, accessed, and analyzed in hours and days rather than months or years,” the authors write.

Read the Public Roads article to find out how transportation planners and academics combined proactive relationship building with a novel software application to improve safety on Michigan’s 122,000 miles of road.