How a Wisconsin county uses vehicle crash data to drive equitable policy

As part of its plan to make its streets safer, Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, is using a data dashboard and mapping platform to identify crash hotspots and reduce the socioeconomic disparity among victims.

Motor vehicle collisions are one of the leading causes of death in Milwaukee County. Roadway fatalities have increased 34% there since 2019. To help combat this rising issue, a Milwaukee County task force devised a three-phase plan, starting with the release more than one year ago of the Milwaukee County Motor Vehicle Collision Dashboard, or MVC Dashboard. The dashboard includes a comprehensive map showing fatal and nonfatal collisions throughout Milwaukee County, along with charts demonstrating the demographic and characteristic trends of the crashes.

Last week, phase two of the plan was launched. The public dashboard, which uses Esri’s ArcGIS platform, was updated with a “hotspots” tab to allow users to see hotspots for motor vehicle collisions in Milwaukee County. The visualization creates a storyboard highlighting key trends in collisions by road segment and crash density over four-month increments. Users can also filter the data by crash type — bicycle, pedestrian, stolen vehicles and fatal crashes, among others.

Dr. Ben Weston, Milwaukee County’s chief health policy adviser, said the MVC Dashboard project kicked off in 2023.

“The project first started about a year and a half ago with this idea in mind — how can we better understand the trends, better understand what policy changes we can make in Milwaukee County to not only decrease motor vehicle collisions, but address the disparities therein as well? And so we created what’s called the Milwaukee Area Safe Streets Task Force,” Weston said.

He said the task force, or MASST, is a group of about 20 individuals from the Milwaukee County community: law enforcement, firefighters, state and local transportation officials, municipal leaders and academics. The group was tasked with putting together the three-phase plan.

Data matching

Phase three includes making policy recommendations, informed by the dashboard’s data and expert input, on what measures should be enacted to make streets safer across Milwaukee County.

To power the dashboard, Weston said, Milwaukee County largely pulled from law enforcement data about vehicle accidents. But, uniquely, the county also incorporated emergency medical services data, which Weston said contributed a lot of “actual new data lines that have not been seen before” to make the dataset more accurate.

“Now, the challenge with [incorporating EMS data], and I think this is the other barrier, is it’s hard data to match up. It seems like it would be easy at, you know, 10 o’clock a.m. on this date, there was a crash at this intersection — you could pair them up, but unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward,” Weston told Statescoop. “Just because of the way the data is recorded, when the data is recorded, how the data is recorded, it can be tricky to match them up, but that’s one of the things we’re working on right now, is matching up our EMS data to our law enforcement data, and seeing what it adds when we pair EMS data on top of this as well.”

Equity-driven

Milwaukee County, Weston told StateScoop, has been a leader in using dashboards powered by map data to help close disparities in equity for issues plaguing the community. For example, Weston said, Milwaukee County was one of the first jurisdictions in the U.S. to launch a comprehensive and equity-driven COVID-19 dashboard that tracked active cases.

“We’ve done a number of different dashboards in Milwaukee County,” he said. “They’re all public-facing, they’re transparent, they’re equity focused and they’re data driven to inform not just us as the government, but also community members, also academics, also community organizations, of what’s going on in our neighborhood so that they can use that data and have it inform their interventions as well.”

The county’s COVID-19 dashboard helped municipal leaders identify and address disparities in COVID-19 deaths — which disproportionately impacted the local Black community, Weston said — leading to more intentionally targeted interventions and resources.

Similarly, Weston said, the MVC Dashboard shows that injuries and deaths resulting from motor vehicle collisions disproportionately affect low-income populations and people of color. The data visualizations allow experts to identify disparities and tailor initiatives to maximize their impact through the lens of equity.

“Really, what equity is about with all of this is targeting resources to where they’re going to be most impactful,” Weston said. “It’s not a bad word. It shouldn’t be controversial. It’s to say we could put a roundabout on every single intersection in Milwaukee County, but that’s not really what’s needed. You know, there’s there’s interventions that are needed at this intersection, that aren’t needed at that intersection, and some that are needed in this community, that aren’t needed in that aren’t needed in that community. And that’s what equity is about, is doing what’s going to be most impactful for the folks who need it most.”