The Missouri State Highway Patrol publicly announced an online version of its Safety Traffic Compendium last week.
The compendium provides the public with traffic accident reports derived from the patrol's Statewide Traffic Accident Records System (STARS). The STARS program, which receives $132,000 in funding from MoDOT's office of Highway Safety, provides additional information including crash mapping and characteristic summaries.
The online version contains reports from 2002-2013 and Captain John Hotz with the patrol hopes statistics for 2014 will be available in the next couple of months.
"We want to provide more information to the general public so it's more user friendly and it can be looked at very easily in a matter of seconds," Hotz said.
The online compendium has organized crash reports based on different variables: speed, alcohol/drug, accidents involving pedestrians, motorcycle accidents, bus accidents, accidents involving animals/deer and more. The compendium also provides traffic crash reports during the holiday seasons which groups accidents by peak periods during the year, Hotz said. The holiday reports contain data about the number of sustained injuries, crashes and deaths, he added.
Although the patrol has had a hard copy of the compendium for years it took a team to develop an interactive version for online a year and a half before it could be used. The interactive version now uses a formula for every additional year the patrol adds as the statistics become available.
The interactive form has been available to the public for about a month, Hotz said, but they kept it under the radar to make sure public users had a handle on using it before making announcement.
When the patrol only had access to a hard copy of the compendium they would have to hunt through the files for data when people called for the information, Hotz said.
"This is a tool that makes it easier to access some of that information," Hotz said. "Now we can get the word out so people working on grant research or papers can go online and get the information they're looking for."
Hotz also believes it makes it easier for highway patrol officers to find trends in the accidents during certain times so that they can cover an area during the dangerous peak times.
"They can look at it historically so they can focus more efforts to stop the problems they've been seeing," Hotz said.