Safe Streets for All: data analysis at VHB

At VHB I was the data person on Safe Streets for All, the federal program that funds cities and states to figure out where people are getting hurt and actually do something about it. Over a year and change I worked on more than fifteen of these Safety Action Plans across North Carolina, Colorado, and New York.

The raw material was always the same kind of mess: years of statewide crash records, in a slightly different format every time, that I had to clean, normalize, and stitch together with roadway and equity data. The fun part was turning that into something a planner or a city council member could actually sit with. I built interactive Power BI dashboards where you could see where the severe crashes cluster, which ones overlap with historically underserved neighborhoods, and whether a proposed fix would land where the risk really is.

After the third or fourth plan I got tired of rebuilding the same thing, so I made reusable data models that let us spin up a new jurisdiction’s analysis without starting from scratch. That’s the instinct I keep coming back to: if I’m doing it by hand twice, I’d rather build the tool.