Summary of a case study published in 2019
The city of Bogotá has used an approach known as Vision Zero to tackle road safety. The approach emphasizes the importance of a “safe system” that considers design of urban infrastructure, vehicle standards, and road-user risk behaviours when tackling road safety. For all of these elements, high-quality data are necessary to inform planning and track the results of new policies.
Compared to many other cities in Colombia, Bogotá has a relatively robust data bank on road safety incidents. This is partly due to an agreement with the local Public Transport Police that supports the collection of regular data. Through this agreement, road safety data are continuously updated: each new road incident is registered through the Police Report on Road Incidents (IPAT) and coded using a geolocation tool. As a result, registration of road traffic casualties has improved in recent years, providing a more accurate source data for local planning.
Use of the data is maximized by the city’s open data policy, which enables data to be published in a way that allows citizens and policymakers to track road safety progress. The city has created a data portal known as the Sistema Integrado de Información sobre Movilidad Urbano Regional
(‘Integrated Information System on Regional Urban Mobility’), or SIMUR. The portal allows public access to city mobility data through a website and mobile app, and also provides other data-related services such as real-time updates on traffic incidents. An annual report is produced that provides a comprehensive overview of key road safety indicators in the city, and progress in reducing mortality and risk factors. Data visualization is a core component of both the annual reporting and the SIMUR platform, making it easy for individuals and policymakers to understand what the data collected really means in practice.
Local data are crucial, but the city has also worked to integrate data from national sources, such as the National Department of Statistics and the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences. This allows for comparisons between Bogotá and the rest of the country on comparable indicators such as transport-related deaths. Municipal authorities have also aligned their mortality index on road safety with the methodology recommended by WHO for numbers of deaths or injuries per 100 000 inhabitants. This allows for cross-national and international comparisons of road death trends.
Taken together, all of the data have allowed the city to obtain a fuller picture of incident locations and mortality trends. This in turn has helped inform decisions about where to target new initiatives and highlight areas for future actions.