Improving Highway Safety Through Collaboration Information on traffic-related deaths and accidents are two to three years out of date in some states, making it difficult to devise new safety regulations, rebuild unsafe roads, develop safer automobiles, and improve emergency services.

Systems used by federal, state, and local agencies to collect and share information need to be overhauled, and the U.S. Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it would ask Congress for $300 million over the next six years to upgrade them.

The goal is to eliminate antiquated paper-based reporting systems and implement a nationwide initiative to automate and synchronize the collection and sharing of information. The information will include vehicle-related injuries, associated health care costs, safety stops, driver licenses, vehicle registration, and adjudicated violations.

SAFER DRIVING

Federal highway safety officials want $300 million to finance: Wireless communications equipment to facilitate electronic information collection and transmission during traffic safety stops. Real-time information transfer and editing processes to update driver's license or vehicle registration information from traffic stops or crash sites. Centralized access to query all traffic record databases. Standardized search capabilities on common queries and information transmission using XML formats.

Few states have the capability to capture and transmit traffic record and crash information electronically, and those that do are limited, according to Joseph Carra, director of the National Center for Statistics and Analysis at the highway safety agency. "Today, the information is written and stored in files. It's a paper process. The files are sent to the state office, whose clerks input the information into proprietary computer systems. And there it sits," he said.

COLLABORATING

Better information will save lives and money, says the federal highway safety administration. About 43,220 people were killed on the nation's highways in 2003, and another 2.9 million suffered serious injuries. Traffic accidents in 2000, the latest year for which information is available, cost the U.S. economy about $230 billion, the agency says.

The wide-ranging proposal calls for standardized formats to improve information sharing among various government agencies and private groups, more sophisticated sensors in cars and along highways to gather detailed information on crashes, and wireless handheld devices to let police officers check for outstanding warrants on drivers, among other ideas. Federal funding will encourage states to adopt federal standards. Many states, suffering from a slow economy and declining tax revenues, have not been able to fund upgrades themselves. Some, however, have projects under way

Revamping Texas Texas is about halfway done with an IT project to build a crash-records information system, a joint initiative between its Department of Public Safety and the Texas Department of Transportation. When completed, police officers will be able to file accident reports via the Web, and other state agencies will be able to electronically link their systems with it and share information. Texas has been working on the crash-records system for several years.

The state has a $9.9 million contract with IBM to build an information warehouse using a DB2 Universal Database, WebSphere Application Server, Tivoli Storage Manager, and MQ-Series, its message-queuing product. IBM says Florida, Arizona, and New Mexico are considering similar systems. The Texas system is replacing a decades-old one that is "archaic and in need of many changes," said Carol Rawson, deputy division director for the traffic operations division with the state transportation department.

The old system requires time-consuming manual entry of around 850,000 accident forms a year, as well as manual cross-checking and validation to ensure the information is correct. Because the process took so long, the state's accident information is backlogged some 30 months. "This is all about safety," Rawson said. "The way you tell if a road is safe is you look at accident information. So that information is critical

Questions

1. How are collaboration tools helping to save lives in Texas?

2. How could a police department use groupware to help with collaboration on accident reports?

3. Describe how a police department could use workflow systems to help with accident reports and health-care-related issues.

4. What would be the impact on lives if a state fails to implement collaboration tools to help track and analyze highway accidents?

5. How could police departments use wireless technologies to operate more efficiently and effectively? 6. What ethical issues surrounding wireless technologies should police departments understand?