Training webinar on how to upload crash data into your Urban SDK account and view it as a layer on top of speed reports.
In this webinar we cover how to add crash locations to any Insights report. This feature makes it even easier to draw correlations between speed and safety issues.
We go over how to add crash data to your account, and provide an example of how to interpret it.
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Transcript of training webinar
Intro
Hey everyone, thanks for joining us. We're very excited for today's webinar. We are going to go over our brand new crash integration tool.
So if this is your first webinar, thank you for joining us. My name is Ashley, I'm the Director of Customer Success over here at Urban SDK, and I'm also going to toss it to Andrew to let him introduce himself and kind of jump into the material. But if you guys have any questions, please drop those in the chat.
We'll have a Q&A session at the end of Andrew's presentation. And if you want to do a one-on-one session or learn any more about the tool, please feel free to reach out to myself or whoever your Urban SDK representative is. Andrew, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to you.
Awesome, thank you, Ashley. So hello everyone, welcome back if you are a returning guest, and welcome if this is your first of our webinar series. My name is Andrew Lerner, I'm Senior Transportation Planner here at Urban SDK.
I'm a former transportation engineering consultant myself, and I've been a former customer of Urban SDK as well. So with a lot of these different webinars, you've probably come to hear how I've been in your shoes in a lot of different cases, so it's exciting to me personally to be able to present our new features to you. So Urban SDK as a firm is a company that has always been driven, our evolution has always been driven by our customers, and this crash integration tool that we're going to be demonstrating to you today is the latest example of our product growing to meet your needs.
As we've met with our customers over time, we've been really been impressed, or it's really been impressed upon us rather, how valuable it is to have readily accessible crash or collision data. Now this is something that we've covered in previous webinars as well, where we showed you how to layer your speed data from our insights product with your own collision data on top of one another in our studio product, but today we're going to go a little bit deeper and showcase one of our new tools. Previously you could store collision data in your data hub, and you could load it into studio, but that was in some ways too many steps.
Candidly speaking, it was a little bit cumbersome to run a speed report in insights and then export your findings over to another part of the platform. So now you can access crash data right within your insights platform itself, layer that data over any reports you're building there, you can see it without having to load it in from a separate source, giving you that added measure of visibility into your roadways. And now before I get too far, when I say without adding it from a separate source, I want to be sure to note that we at Urban SDK, we're not providing this crash data.
This is crash data that would be provided by any number of sources that is a little work up front for you and uploading the file yourself, because crash data can come from a lot of different sources. It can come from a state department of transportation, it can come from a local police department, but we're going to go through this in today's webinar to show you how you can take the crash data that you yourself have integrated into our platform. And then from this point onwards, once it's integrated, it'll show up automatically in your platform for whatever insights reports you're running after this point.
So what's the value of doing that? Well, for those of you who've been running safety reports with our insights tool, life just got a lot easier. And for those of you who aren't, well, hopefully today's demonstration will show you how quickly and easily you can start correlating road speeds to a crash site or a hotspot. And before I get into the demo, I just want to thank everyone who suggested this enhancement.
It's truly made for a smoother experience within our platform. And I'm saying that both as a former customer as well as currently a team member. And on that note, if you ever have any ideas for features or tools within our platform, please always feel free to let us know.
Like I said earlier, Urban SDK is a company who's been really driven, or evolution's been driven by consulting with our customers. We always want to look for ways to make your lives easier, but at the same time, make our platform work for you and provide value for you. So with all that said, let's jump into the product, check out this new feature, and go through the steps of creating a crash integration, uploading our data into insights.
Logging in
So as always, we're going to begin at the splash screen, got my credentials preloaded in here, so I'm going to click sign in. And when we jump right into the home screen, the first thing we're going to notice, as we always do, is on the left, the left hand menu here, if I click the carrot to jump out, we start by defaulting to our personal workspace, which is just a sandbox environment. You've probably heard me say this, if you're returning guests to our webinar series, personal workspace is a sandbox environment, where you can test out different features from our platform.
But the products you produce in the personal workspace are essentially for testing, they can't be shared with other members of your organization, or members of the public. So to work within your organizational workspace and share among stakeholders and the members of the public, you're going to click on the personal workspace, jump down to your organizational workspace, which for me says Urban SDK. That's our internal workspace, but yours will say your agency or firm's name instead.
So previously, we've done a lot of work within insights, which is where we pull our speed data from and studio, which is our GIS mapping software. Today, we're going to be producing the crash integration, and we're going to be producing it by integrating our data within Data Hub, which is kind of like your system of record for any form of data that you either pull from insights within our system, or that you yourself provide. It's essentially an online cloud data storage solution for your transportation data.
Adding crash data to your account
So if you want to integrate your crash data, we're going to click on Data Hub. And you can see a lot of different analyses that have been completed before. We're going to go from data sets at the top here over to integrations.
Now see there's some crash integrations before that we've been doing a lot of testing of this feature as it is quite brand new, hence the different error messages you see on these ones here. But I'm actually just going to move this to the side, move that to the side. And I'm going to create a new crash integration.
So it's refreshing it right there. There we go. So I'm going to create a new crash integration, which is the blue button on the side there.
So click Create. And then we're immediately going to be prompted to upload a crash file. So like I said earlier in the preamble to this presentation, crash data is something that you can be provided from local law enforcement, from State Department of Transportation.
There's a lot of different sources for collision data around the country. And we've tried to create an integration into our tool that is as flexible as possible, understanding that crash data often comes in a lot of different formats with a lot of different columns involved. In my previous life as a consultant, I received crash data in a lot of different formats and spent as an intern many a day taking PDFs and turning them into a more usable format.
So we try to make the integration as flexible as possible. We do require a CSV file, which is essentially the most basic type of data file that you could upload crash data in. We're going to click the Browse Files here.
And I've already saved two crash files here onto my system. So the file that we've got here, this crashes.csv, this is a sample of crash data for the entire state of Florida from January through September of 2023. Now, this is a file that I have pulled myself that we have from a partner of ours, Signal 4 Analytics, which is Florida Collisions Database.
But I'm going to be showing you how to add a fairly basic crashes file into the crash integration tool and integrate it with the Insights platform. So I double clicked it. We can see there's a spinning circle here just to show that we're uploading.
Keeping in mind, as always, as we're using a browser-based solution here, sometimes the upload speed will vary based on your own internet connection. So we're hoping my internet connection is up to the task today. And it looks like it is because it's now loaded.
Mapping your data
So I'm going to click Continue. We're given a data wizard here. It shows the different columns within our crashes file.
So you can actually see the columns that are within the CSV that I just loaded in. I have an ID column, a date and time column, a latitude, a longitude, and then a string column here called severity that has four different values in it for the four different types of severity. So I'm going to click Continue.
And I'm going to give this a name. Let's say Florida Jan 263 crashes. And data source provider.
This is just information that you can enter in to keep track of your own files and make sure you have good file accounting. So now we come to one of the most important parts. Earlier on, I mentioned that we tried to make this tool as flexible as possible.
There are, however, for crash data to be loadable into the platform, a few required columns or variables that you'll need your data set to have in order to load it appropriately. We've tried to keep it to a minimum while also making sure the tool is useful to you. So there's five required values, a latitude column, a longitude column.
And those two are just geo-referencing essentially so that the data can be mapped out on the map. A unique crash ID column. This can be any kind of ID system, any numerical ID system you want, but just so there's a unique value for every crash.
Severity, which is again, as I mentioned, it's a string. We're looking for something along the lines of property damage only, minor injury, serious injury, or unfortunately as many crashes do result in fatality. And the date time field, which is going to be in like a date time format, like you would use in Microsoft Excel.
The reason we're looking for a date time format here is because as you might be aware when you're using our insights tool, we provide our speed data by months of the year. So when I show you an example in just a moment, we're going to be loading speed data for June 2023. The point of having a date time column here is that when you load a crashes file and then you load up an insights report, the only the crashes that are within the time period you're reviewing the speed data for will become visible in insights.
This is so you can upload a single CSV with crashes from the last 10 years, if you so desire. But that way, when you go and you look at speed data for June 2023, for instance, you don't see a bunch of unrelated crashes and collisions from other times of the year, perhaps from 2010 or 2013 or, you know, essentially what I mean from unrelated times of the year or unrelated time periods. So we have the date time column as well.
And so we've got here on the left, these are the five required columns. And when I click the match column here, what happens is we see the five different columns that were within the CSV that were within the CSV that we were looking at. So basically, I'm going to click latitude, match it to latitude, longitude, match it to longitude, crash ID, match it to crash ID, severity, match to crash severity, and date time, I'm going to match to date time.
Now, you might have also noticed when I was clicking these drop down menus, there's also additional field or hide field. So if there were fields beyond these five required fields here, within your CSV, they showed up here on the left in the CSV columns. And then you could choose how to handle them.
So if we had additional crash data, such as the weather conditions at the time that the collision took place, and that was stored in the column in our CSV, it would show up here in the CSV column field as well, you could choose to whether to load that into the integration as an additional field in addition to the five required ones, or to hide it so that it doesn't show up when you're loading the crash integration into insights. So I'm also going to click validate integration now, where we essentially validate to make sure that the five different types of that the five different types of data that we were that we were required for the crash integration are in the correct format, and that the correct types of data in the correct columns. So we've got a green checkmark indicating that all as well.
So at this point, I will click create crash integration. I've already loaded a few different crash integrations into the platform here. While we've been testing this feature out so that we can avoid having to wait for this file to process because it does take some time to process not just to upload but also to process and match onto our servers.
So for the sake of brevity and timekeeping here on our webinar, I've loaded a few different crash integrations already. At this point, like I said, though, you would click create crash integration. You'd notice that if you were to click out of this side wizard, you'd notice your crash integration show up in the field here, and then it would have a status of processing, and then finally active once it's finished.
Interpreting your safety report
So as I said, that's how you complete a crash integration creation. But I'm going to jump over to insights at this point so we can take a look at some of the results of our crash integration that I've previously loaded in. So click the insights beta on the left here, and we have the ability to select a geographic area because this is the internal account where we work with a lot of our different customers and help them with their individual projects.
We have a lot of different options for geographies. We're going to be taking a quick look at some crashes I loaded earlier in for Duval County where our firm is headquartered. So click Duval.
Obviously, I have the option, and you're probably familiar with this if you've attended our previous webinars as well, I have the option to load the entire county's worth of data or just some specific census tracts. Today, we're going to load the entire county's worth of data. We're going to load Duval County.
This is traffic speeds, and so as you saw, it said traffic speed analysis. The goal here behind the crash integration is that when you pull our urban SDK provided traffic speed data, it will be loaded onto the map with your crashes immediately there for you. The idea being that you can then more easily identify hotspots.
You can more easily identify areas of safety concerns by uploading your crashes once, and then anytime you pull data from our insights tool, your crashes will always be there. So I'm going to change the time here from 2022 to 2023 in June and click build report. So it'll take just a moment here for us to build a speed report for the entirety of Duval County, which if I recall correctly, is the largest county by surface area in the largest city, Jacksonville's largest city by surface area in the United States.
So here we have all of our speed data for the city of Jacksonville and for Duval County. Now, we wanted to see our crash integration. You can immediately see over here on the left extra layers with little crashes assigned.
So these are the crash integrations that I've created before. Obviously, a lot of them just say test, but the State Department of Transportation crash data that we've gotten, I'm going to click that to load it. So immediately, we're still just looking at our speed data, but you'll notice in the top right here, we now have an extra entry on the legend.
It says severity of crash, unknown, minor, serious, or fatal injury. So this is just some dummy data that I loaded in so we could have some data visible for the webinar here today. So this is why when you actually see the crashes starting to populate, you can see one here and one over here on our map, they're blue for unknown severity.
If you have matched the severity column correctly, the way that I showed you earlier, you will see minor, serious, or fatal, or property damage only, of course, as well, as the different categories of crash severity. So immediately, you can see we have our speed data, which is in the same format we've always been using it here based on plus or minus 10 miles per hour above or below the urban SDK speed category. But we're also seeing the crashes layered right on top of it.
So if I'm going to zoom in over here, we see West 13th Street has a collision right here on it. Now, West 13th Street has an urban SDK speed category, 40 miles per hour. The average and 85th percentile speeds are slightly below that.
We're seeing around 85th percentile speed of 35 miles per hour. And so let's take a look at the collision data right here. We can see that there was a serious injury and unfortunately, a fatal injury here as well in this particular collision.
Like I said, this is just dummy data that I've loaded here for us. But immediately, we can see the crashes layer has been loaded on top of the speed layer. And we've already been able to draw a conclusion here, which is that despite the fact that the speeds 85th percentile on average on this street were below the urban SDK speed category, we nevertheless had a collision here in June 2023 that was a fatal injury.
As I mentioned earlier, the crash integration has only loaded collisions that took place during the month we selected, which is June. And if we'd like to zoom out a little bit and see only the crashes, we can actually toggle off the average speed layer here and we can see different crashes that we have loaded to our crash integration. There's another one over here.
If we zoom out, we can see there's another dot over here. Essentially, this is an idea that the idea behind this data set is that if we were to have a hotspot in mind or an area where there's a safety concern in mind, we'd be able to zoom in immediately to the area in question and we would see our speed data and our crash integration data loaded all in one. So to summarize the purpose of the crash integration tool, this is something that a lot of you, our customers, have come back to us and said that it can be tedious to load speed data and collision data from multiple different sources when you're building maps to discuss, analyze, or present and share safety concerns, maybe with stakeholders and members of the public within our platform.
The entire idea behind our crash integration tool is to be able to provide you the opportunity to upload your crash data once and then it will live within our data hub so that anytime that you load a map of speeds here on our insights tool, you'll have your speeds and your collisions all in one place. This is helping build our product towards being able to be a sort of system of record for your traffic and transportation safety data. Obviously, we are very excited about this integration and we're excited about working with our customers to get new ideas for how to make our platform more useful for you and doing so help you create a safer transportation network and safer streets for all of us who rely on them.
So I want to thank everyone for watching and bearing with me through our demonstration today and I will kick it back over to Ashley to see if we have any questions about our crash integration tool. Thanks, Andrew. We do have a few questions and if there are any other additional questions, please go ahead and drop those in the chat.
Q&A
The first question though is where is this data coming from? Is this something that Urban SDK is providing or is this something that our customers need to provide themselves? So I mentioned earlier during our presentation, but just to reiterate, collision data comes from a lot of different sources. Different jurisdictions handle it differently in different jurisdictions. There's a different responsible party for collision data.
So in this case, as with many different, you know, as with essentially the way we were doing collisions before the crash integration tool as well, you provide the file yourself, you load it into the crash integration and then it will live within our data hub to create that kind of system of record. But we ourselves at this moment are not providing the collision data. We're providing the integration with the speed data that we do provide so you can see it and build reports all in one place.
Fantastic, thank you. The next question we have is what is the cost for this integration and how do we get it? This integration is just an updated part of our platform. There's no additional cost.
As we roll out features like this, they're just added into your existing subscriptions. So if you have a subscription to Urban SDK, this will become active in your portal already. So if you'd like to access crash integrations, if you load up your Urban SDK workspace, go in your organizational workspace on the left here and then go down to data hub.
I'll just exit out the map that I just created and click integrations. That's where you can find it, but it's not at any extra cost. It's just an updated part of our platform that we're excited to share with all of you.
Fantastic. The next question is, can you tell us about the data's origin and can you dissect it by week rather than month? So you already kind of touched on the origin, but can you talk through dissecting it weekly rather than monthly? Yeah, of course. So essentially, if you want to dissect it weekly, our speed data within the insights tool is provided on a monthly basis.
So if you'd like to dissect the data weekly, you can essentially prepare a crash file that is just for one week rather than for a month and upload that as a custom integration. You can upload it and title it, say, week of December 6th, for instance. And then when you upload it as a custom integration, you can go back to your insights tool, load up your speed data for December, and then you can toggle on only the crashes for that particular week.
So if you were looking at a week where maybe a special event was taking place, which is just one possible use case I would imagine for using data on a weekly cadence, you could filter down only to the crashes that took place within that one week, layer that over top of the monthly average speed data, and then you'd be able to have those two data sets side by side to compare. Fantastic. Thanks, Andrew.
No problem. Oh, we've had a few more questions come in. The next is, if there's multiple accidents at an intersection or on a roadway segment with the same longitude and latitude, how is that going to look on the platform? No, so that's a very good question.
They will stack directly on top of one another. So we're currently in the process of sort of updating this tool. As you can see, we've been working on it.
It's fairly fresh off the presses. And so we're in the process of sort of giving you the ability to layer those on top of one another so that you can see if they're directly on top of each other rather than just what would appear to be just one dot, basically. Alternatively, something else we've been exploring is the ability to, if you have multiple crashes within one small geographic radius or directly on top of one another, to have the crash symbol be larger or perhaps colored differently, essentially playing around with the symbology.
This is never really a perfect answer when it comes to symbology with any GIS-based solution, but I would say stay tuned for that, for the ability to add a little bit more customization into the symbology for the crashes. Fantastic. It looks like we have a call out as well for all of our Florida customers.
We had someone mention that Signal 4 has a similar style, so all of our Florida customers can check there for those file types. For sure. Let's see.
Next up, if we have old crash data, say five years ago, is there speed data that goes that far back and can we use the tool with it? I'll flip that over to you, Ashley, with regards to how far back we can get our speed data and whether that's a possibility for your particular subscription. You may know that one better than I, or you might have to come into contact with your SDK account rep. Yeah, absolutely.
We do have the ability to pull a rolling five years, so what is it? December of 2018 would be the farthest back for data that we'll have. It would be an additional cost to most subscriptions. It's kind of a case-by-case basis that we're happy to talk through.
If that's the case, if you have that data, then yes, you could match the speed data to those crash data points, but it would be something you'd have to talk through with your Urban SDK representative, and we're happy to have that conversation. Of course. Awesome.
Then last but not least, is there a field or type of collision, for example, rear-ended, pedestrians, bikes, etc.? Right. When I was doing the data matching earlier, I mentioned briefly the ability to add any field as an additional field. Obviously, there's a lot of other pieces of crash information, like this question mentioned, like the type of collision, weather conditions, time of day, or whether it was dark, light, that kind of thing.
These are all different fields that you can add as an additional field when you're doing that field mapping. When you highlight the crash in Insights, once it's integrated, the tool tip that shows up, which is that sort of call-out menu, when you hover over a crash, we'll have that information as well. Any of those other pieces of information about crashes can be added to the crash integration.
Like I said earlier, with this crash integration, we're just trying to make sure that the integration is the most flexible that it can be. We only required the five fields that I mentioned, the latitude, longitude, date, time, severity, and ID, but any other fields of information about crashes can easily be added in just as an additional field. Fantastic.
I told a little white lie, we just had one more question come in, and I think it's an important one, so I want to touch on it. Is there a way to see more than a month's worth of crash data, or is it tied into the month's worth of speed data? Could you see, for example, a year's worth of crash data within the yearly ADTs, for example, in a studio map, potentially? In a studio map, absolutely. In a studio map, any data that you would like can be loaded up easily.
Studio's a very flexible JS mapping solution that we have here on, just available on the left. Within the Insights product, as of this moment, it's tethered to the month of data that you've loaded. It would be a month-by-month basis if you're using crash integration in your Insights tool, but as I mentioned before, if you upload your crash data to Data Hub, then you can easily add it into a studio map at any time.
Whether if you'd like to compare it with ADTs or with any other form of data that has a time horizon of a year rather than a month, that can always be done within our studio tool. Awesome. Thanks, Andrew.
No problem. That's all the time we have for questions right now, but if you guys have additional questions or if you want to do a private training session on this new tool or on the platform as a whole, please do not hesitate to reach out to your Urban SDK representative. We are always here and happy to help.
This is going to be our last webinar for the year, so it's a little premature, but we want to wish everyone a safe holiday season. Happy New Year. I'm sure we'll talk to most of you before all of that happens, but we will be sending out our new schedule in the new year for our new webinar series.
We're going to continue this cadence every other week starting back up in January, so look out for that schedule. We hope to see you all there, and again, if you have any questions at all, please do not hesitate to reach out to your Urban SDK representative. With that, we will say good afternoon, have a great day, and we'll talk soon.
Thanks so much, everyone.