Mobility patterns will continue to evolve and understanding where the most up-to-date information on where collisions or incidents occur is crucial to helping cities create safer and smarter transportation systems. However, the majority of cities and government agencies rely on police-reported crash data, when evaluating where to make improvements in infrastructure and when prioritizing high-risk locations. Crash data is generally at least a year old before it is accessible by planners and engineers.

Ford sees an opportunity to provide a more holistic view of what is happening on city streets with the most up-to-date information available via connected vehicle event data. Using Ford’s Safety Insights platform, in collaboration with StreetLight Data, the company’s goal is to help to proactively arm cities with the up-to-date, rich information they need to make more informed — and more timely — decisions about their safety infrastructure.

Since late 2020, Ford has been working with Michigan State University (MSU) on an ongoing research project to analyze existing connected vehicle event data, which captures insights around harsh acceleration, harsh braking, and harsh turns, against crash data from 2015–2019 in Southeast Michigan. Connected vehicle event data has significant promise because it can be obtained both at a larger scale and in a timelier manner than crash-reported data.

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