Boston is a national leader in transport planning and emergency medical services (EMS) response and, innovating at the interface of those two policy areas, found a better way to use emergency response data to help the city make streets safer for kids.
A new project I helped run shows how city agencies looked beyond standard crash maps, which are very helpful but typically focus only on where car crashes happen.
Instead, the project combined street and EMS data with information about patients’ home neighborhoods to understand who is getting hurt and which communities are most affected.
Children from Boston’s poorer neighborhoods are more likely to be struck by cars while walking or biking, and one window in which this risk is present is during school commute hours.
During the hours when children are heading to or from school, 7 in 10 of those crashes involved children from low- or moderate-income areas.
These analytics broadened how Boston was able to think about crash risk. Officials have been able to reveal clusters where school commute crashes are concentrated and prioritize traffic-calming projects and outreach.
This shows one way that emergency medical services records can be used to prevent people getting hurt or sick. Boston’s approach is a practical example of how better data can lead to more equitable, more targeted public policy.
Read more on Brennan’s research on mobility risk in the city of Boston in this article he wrote for The Faculty Blog.
