In an effort to provide law-enforcement agencies with faster crash reports, the Arizona Department of Transportation is improving its data-collection methods.
With more than $350,000 granted from the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety, ADOT will be able to get more state agencies to use an electronic form for submitting crash reports.
The electronic reports will replace the paper ones sent from many agencies all over the state to be manually entered into the system. This improvement will help keep the data up to date and will give staff more time to work with the information and identify trends.
Steve Elliott, spokesman for ADOT, says the previous method was arduous and inefficient.
“Information is power when it comes to studying crashes. And getting the information needed to identify trends faster, really ultimately makes Arizona safer for all of us,” Elliott said.
ADOT began the switch to electronic forms a couple of years ago. With the help of this grant, it will be able to make reporting more uniform and provide more agencies with the latest software.