Challenges in Open Transportation Data for Crash and Traffic Safety Analysis

Other conference contribution, 2026

Reliable, publicly accessible transportation data is essential for traffic safety research, crash analysis, and the development and evaluation of safety-critical transport systems.
The primary aim of this study is to systematically characterize the availability, technical properties, and limitations of open transportation datasets, and to assess their suitability for crash analysis, safety system development, and infrastructure-level safety analysis. A secondary aim is to identify technical and organizational barriers to data sharing that affect the feasibility of integrated, multi-source safety analyses.
The results indicate that while existing open datasets are technically sufficient to support a broad range of crash analysis and traffic safety applications, their effective integration requires improved standardization, clearer governance frameworks, and transparent documentation of dataset limitations. Addressing these challenges is critical to enabling reliable, multi-source traffic safety analyses and supporting evidence-based road safety solutions and transport policy development.