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We received several requests from Citations & Withdrawals for purged crash reports. We worked with the TOPS Lab to add the Customer Number to the existing WisTransPortal Data Retrieval feature in an effort to provide more efficient self-service for these types of requests.

Data Finalization

2022 Re-Finalization

2022 RP Coding has been completed and RP Data incorporated into the 2022 data that had been finalized in May 2023. Comparisons of these datasets show no differences other than newly provided RP data and some record timestamps. These re-finalized data are ready to be deployed.

2023 Finalization

As we did last year we are scheduling 2 finalizations, a primary on 2024-05-15 and a secondary on 2024-05-22. (Last year we successfully finalized on the primary date.) We expect to extract, package and test during the remainder of the week following finalization and expect to deploy extracts in time for analysts to begin their work with them at the start of the following week.

We have begun to create the Finalization of 2023 Crash Data (Draft) report. So far is has preliminary 2023 crash statistics akin to those provided in Final year-end crash statistics.

Fatalities and Finalization

In recent years, getting to the final fatality numbers has been a concern for the scheduling of finalization as the FARS team has been working on the analysis and coding of that years crash data. This remains a concern for this year. It has been typical for some crash fatalities to be found not to count as reportable once they come under greater scrutiny by the FARS team. That remains a problem for this year. I believe that we can improve this situation by adopting systematic review of cause of death information of crash fatalities. The current process is essentially manual and historically has not been especially systematic. We have begun to develop more systematic work practices for both cause of death and crash related factors that affect fatal crash reportability. Automation of checks between monthly death certificate data and FARS cases is yet to be done but should be achievable. Even more could be achieved with data and process improvements to death certificate data we receive from Wisconsin DHS Vital Records. But past experience indicates that there are considerable bureaucratic barriers to changes in these data.

Edit Checks and Finalization

With possibly one exception, we expect to be able to clear all of the critical edit checks prior to finalization. The exception is that we may not have death dates for all fatalities. Some of the missing dates of death are for individuals who survived the crash and were transported out of state for medical treatment.

We have not had the resourced to pursue non-critical but important edit checks as we have in the past. I expect our performance on those checks to be poorer than it has been over the past several years.

FARS Systems Status

Cases Without Crash Reports

There are currently 11 2023 fatal DOT crashes in our case management system that we have not yet received a crash report for:

About half of these are recent enough to not be of particular concern. But the Milwaukee PD backlog is something that we would like to clear up. The CRU has made repeated contacts with the Milwaukee PD to try to get these report transmitted.

The Daily Fatality Report

Currently the Daily Fatality Report depends upon an old Access database that had been used for case management. It is prone to failure, and it is not uncommon to need to put several hour of work into addressing failures so that we can get the daily fatality report out. We’d like to retire this tool from case management duties and use it for reporting only as we develop replacement means of creating reports.

DMV Systems and SR

Ken Matthews

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Crash Data Analysis and Reporting

Valerie Payne

Analysts to review data requests with a SharePoint tool

Scheduled Topics and Briefing documents

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