How Cities Use Risk Scores to Prioritize Safer Roads and Infrastructure Projects

Risk scoring and Urban SDK’s Collision Index help cities identify dangerous roads, justify funding, and plan smarter, data-backed infrastructure projects.

City transportation officials are moving from reactionary fixes (speed humps or cameras after each crash) to proactive, data-driven planning. By leveraging comprehensive safety data, agencies can pinpoint trouble spots and target interventions where they’ll save lives. 

In fact, experts note that a data-driven approach allows policymakers to identify high-risk areas and prioritize interventions accordingly. Urban SDK’s platform turns traffic feeds and crash history into intuitive risk scores (such as our Collision Index) so planners get one unified metric of danger on every street. This helps officials shift from anecdote (we had a wreck here) to evidence (this segment scores 0.87 risk, among the highest in our city).

Our Collision Index illustrates this principle: it ingests multiple years of fatal-crash data, vehicle speeds, traffic counts and roadway factors, and computes a risk score 0–1 for each road segment. The result is a citywide risk map. 

Now a planner or engineer can instantly see which corridors stand out as outliers, instead of manually cross-referencing crash logs and speed surveys. Urban SDK provides easy access to quick, reliable data that helps us make faster decisions” by eliminating time-consuming traffic counts.

• Identify High-Risk Corridors: Our scores highlight the most dangerous roads at a glance. We generate heat maps and ranked lists so that every street is scored and ranked. For example, using an index of historical crashes, traffic volumes, speeding, and roadway characteristics, officials can pinpoint hotspots across their entire roadway network. Planning teams use these hotspot maps to focus analysis, citizen engagement, and safety treatments on the worst segments.
• Evaluate & Refine Interventions: Before our platform, agencies often implemented fixes (like new signs or humps) but lacked a convenient way to quantify impact. With Urban SDK, officials can compare before-and-after data citywide. They can monitor average speed or crash indices on a corridor before a safety project and then after implementation. Transportation experts agree this is critical – by comparing crash data before and after an intervention, planners can determine whether the intervention was successful and adjust their strategies. For example, after we onboard a city, its data analysts often run reports that show whether a new mid-block crossing or enforcement campaign actually drove down the local collision index. If not, the project team can iterate or try alternative measures.
• Optimize Budgeting and Funding: Risk scores give quantifiable rationale for capital projects and grant requests. Rather than justify a road diet or signal upgrade with intuition or isolated complaints, officials can cite a score. 

A recent GovTech article explains that collision-index tools let public works help planning officials decide which road projects to fund by backing up decisions with data. Similarly, the Federal Highway Administration notes that data-driven safety models allow agencies to target investments with more confidence and execute the most beneficial projects with limited resources. In practice, cities use Urban SDK risk reports in capital-improvement plans and grant applications to show funders exactly how a proposed treatment will improve safety on a high-risk road.

Case Study: Camas, WA – Hotspot Mapping in Practice

In Camas, Washington, city engineers partnered with Urban SDK to get a complete, street-by-street picture of risk. The city had received many speeding complaints and wanted to make sure enforcement and traffic calming really address the worst problems. Using our platform, Camas gains a complete view of traffic volumes, speed data, and accident hotspots across the city, allowing for an evidence-based approach to prioritizing resources and implementing traffic calming measures. In other words, every road is scored so Camas can efficiently allocate patrols and capital funds where the risk score is highest.

Camas officials also leverage the system to measure results. By analyzing before-and-after traffic and crash data on treated streets, the team can see if their safety project worked and refine their strategy. As one city planner noted, the platform helps Camas“identify where accidents are more likely to occur and proactively respond to resident concerns about road safety and to measure the impact of traffic calming efforts. This closed feedback loop – data-backed decisions plus measurable outcomes – ensures limited resources go toward solutions that demonstrably reduce risk.

Case Study: Sanford, FL – Building the Case with Data

Across the the state of Florida, cities like Sanford are similarly embracing data-driven safety. Florida agencies have a strong statewide drive to reduce crashes, but often face flat budgets. With Urban SDK, smaller cities can leapfrog expensive speed studies by plugging in local data to get instant insights. One Florida public works director said that Urban SDK provides easy access to quick, reliable data so teams can evaluate road safety issues immediately rather than waiting weeks for counts. This rapid insight allows cities like Sanford to answer concerned citizens on the spot and to include concrete analytics in funding requests.

For example, if community leaders push for a new crosswalk on a busy street, planners can pull Urban SDK scores to show the city council the segment’s risk index. Paired with traffic volume and 85th-percentile speed data, this convinces decision-makers that the project addresses a real danger. In this way, Urban SDK helps City Hall make faster decisions on safety projects by basing them on data, not just perception.

Vision Zero and Beyond: Safer Streets through Data

Urban SDK’s risk scores feed directly into Vision Zero and strategic safety programs. By aligning analytics with goals (like “zero fatalities”), agencies move past scattershot fixes. As FHWA explains, predictive safety analysis “identifies high-risk roadway features” so that “low-cost countermeasures” can be applied citywide, spreading benefits even beyond crash-history hotspots. In practice, our scores help agencies treat not just known hot spots, but all areas with dangerous attributes (wide, high-speed roads, missing crosswalks, poor lighting, etc.) – lowering risk throughout the network.

All of this adds up to smarter investment of scarce funds. Transportation leaders use Urban SDK reports in strategic planning meetings to set priorities and show accountability. As one USDOT analysis points out, agencies that quantify safety can justify alternative traffic calming measures and steps toward long-term goals. And with Urban SDK visualizations, even citizens and elected officials can see why certain roads come first. Our clients routinely share easy-to-understand maps and charts to explain their safety plans and secure grants.

In summary, risk scoring transforms how a city tackles road safety. Instead of chasing every incident, officials use data to plan ahead: identifying dangerous corridors, selecting effective fixes, and measuring progress over time. Urban SDK’s Collision Index and related analytics put that power at every planner’s fingertips. The end result is communities that allocate capital projects efficiently and save lives – because the next red light, sidewalk or bulb will be installed where it truly does the most good.