Starting in October 1, 2007, States were required to have a Strategic Highway Safety Program (SHSP) that identified and analyzed safety problems and opportunities in order to use Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) funds for new eligible activities under 23 USC 148. The Emphasis areas from the SHSP were reviewed and crash data systems will be created and driver behavior will be analyzed as part of ongoing CMRPC safety planning efforts in the upcoming year. The HSIP is a “core funding” program administered by Federal Highway Administration, which apportions funds to States under Section 104(b) (5) for a range of eligible activities focused primarily on infrastructure-related safety improvements. The purpose of the HSIP is to achieve a significant reduction in traffic fatalities and serious injuries on public roads.
 
Projects using Federal HSIP funding are required to be selected by a data driven process. To satisfy this requirement the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) obtains crash data from local police reports collected by the Registry of Motor Vehicles (RMV) Crash Records Section. With the assistance of a consulting agency Geonetics, they developed an automated procedure for processing, standardizing, matching and aggregating the crash data by geographical location using Geographic Information System (GIS) tools and procedures. The information was grouped into crash clusters, bike clusters and pedestrian clusters. For the CMRPC region, automobiles crashes from 2006 -2008 and pedestrian and bicycle crashes from 2002-2008 were extracted from the MassDOT statewide dataset.