Building Equitable Safe Streets for All

This research project aims to address roadway safety in low-income and ethnically diverse communities in the United States by developing a data-driven approach and computational tools to assess equity in roadway safety. Our team, in partnership with Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI), and Safety through Disruption University Transportation Center (Safe-D) at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, employed data from Houston, Texas, one of the most diverse cities in the United States. The final study included a road infrastructure inventory database by employing remote sensing and image processing techniques. Through spatial analysis, this database illustrates the relationship between communities’ socioeconomic and demographic characteristics and traffic safety through the lens of road infrastructure characteristics. The results of this project will assist stakeholders in the development of a data-driven action plan to achieve zero deaths in the City of Houston.