Baltimore’s transportation department has created an interactive map of the city for residents to report near misses — locations where they were almost involved in a car crash or witnessed a near-collision.
The survey will allow residents to find and click on a location on a map, then respond to a series of questions, including how often they have witnessed a near-collision there, what kinds of vehicles or people were involved and the behaviors that they witnessed that may have led to each incident.
The map, found here, will serve as a sort of crowdsourcing for additional information for the department’s new Vision Zero Action Plan, a playbook for reducing road fatalities across the city.
The initiative, funded in part by a 2023 federal safety grant, comes as Maryland reckons with 572 confirmed deaths on state roads last year, including 51 in Baltimore City, according to preliminary data. Of that total, a slight increase from 2023, roughly half of city road deaths were pedestrians or bicyclists.
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In an email, a spokesperson for Baltimore’s transportation department said the map “will give greater neighborhood level context that will supplement our already existing crash data and safety models.” She added that the map will “inform our long-term safety projects and prioritize areas of demonstrated need.”
Survey responses won’t hold the same weight as hard data when planners get to work on different safety interventions, but they can supplement the data and “groundtruth” it in residents’ experiences, said Mansoureh Jeihani, director of the National Transportation Center at Morgan State University.
Jeihani and her team of researchers are partners in the overall Vision Zero effort providing data analysis and modeling, but they are not directly involved with the survey.
There’s no police report or official documentation for crashes that almost happened. But that doesn’t mean transportation planners think those near misses are irrelevant — many are actually fascinated by them.
“The better data that we have and the better picture that we have of the problems, a better solution we can find,” Jeihani said. “The near misses will give us a more comprehensive story of what is happening.”
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Researchers at Morgan State have the technology to study near-misses more closely — they use LiDAR systems, which measure changes in light to detect moving objects in a given environment, to study near-conflicts at two intersections around their campus. The devices can quantify things like jaywalking, cars running red lights and more, and display it all on heat maps to show exactly where those incidents are happening.
Her team will soon be working with officials in West Baltimore, where similar technology is slated for five intersections along North Avenue. Morgan State will serve as a sort of storehouse for the LiDAR data and use it for their own research.
But installing LiDAR at every intersection across town would be monumentally expensive. That’s where the transportation department’s new Vision Zero map can help play a role. Though analysts can’t fact-check each entry on the survey map, transportation officials hope that it can reveal trends and problem areas in the aggregate.
Later this year, transportation officials plan to release a new High Injury Crash Network, mimicking efforts from the state and other local jurisdictions to identify the areas on its road network where the worst crashes happen and how often. It will also include a list of future safety projects.
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