Philly’s new Vision Zero dashboard shows where and how crashes happen

This article is a part of Every Voice, Every Vote, a collaborative project managed by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism with lead support from the William Penn Foundation, and additional funding from Lenfest, Comcast NBC Universal, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Henry L. Kimelman Family Foundation, Judy and Peter Leone, Arctos Foundation, Wyncote Foundation, 25th Century Foundation, Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation and Philadelphia Health Partnership. This article was created independently of the project’s donors.

A comprehensive new dashboard means it’s now easier to track progress (or lack thereof) in Philadelphia’s Vision Zero program, the citywide road safety initiative.

The launch is part of Mayor Cherelle Parker’s effort to modernize how the city presents data to residents, a project known as Philly Stat 360. Across all city agencies and departments, the first quarter of this year brought 12 new datasets and two updates, covering things like free meal sites, infrastructure projects and how police patrol the city. 

The Vision Zero microsite is by far the biggest open data update.

In addition to general info on the safety initiative, it offers interactive maps showing where the city installed traffic calming measures like neighborhood speed cushions (the new, squared-off road bumps), locations of serious or fatal crashes over the course of a year and projects underway across the city’s “high injury network,” aka the 12% of Philly streets that see 80% of crashes. 

“The Vision Zero dashboard shows how the Parker Administration is committed to using data to drive change,” said Kristin Bray, director of Philly Stat 360, “holding ourselves accountable to reduce traffic deaths and injuries in Philadelphia.”

The data reveals a very slight upward trend in pedestrian crashes, which plummeted during pandemic shutdowns — but 2023’s count was still about 31% lower than 2019. Cyclist crashes, meanwhile, are hovering at 40% lower than prepandemic. Overall, the number of pedestrians or cyclists involved in crashes decreased by nearly a third, from 1,929 in 2019 to 1,309 in 2023.

And there’s been a 71% increase in average daily bike trips since 2019, according to the Vision Zero site.

On streets with traditionally high injury rates, the dashboard shows progress from implementing new infrastructure. For example, since the city installed speed cameras on Roosevelt Boulevard in 2020, fatal and serious crashes have decreased by 21%, according to the data.

Streets Department and PPD release the most datasets

Of the 14 dataset updates, only one was automated and two received accompanying visualizations as the city sets out to update its process to be more seamless with more nonmanual systems and more dashboards to display information. 

The Streets Department and the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) released the most new datasets, at three each. Streets updated its tracking of street poles, street nodes and traffic calming devices. PPD’s new releases include its citywide boundaries of districts, service areas and divisions.

Here are all the other data releases and refreshes so far this year:

• Free food and meal sites run by the Office of Children and Families
• GSI SoakItUp adoption sites by the Philadelphia Water Department (manual data refresh)
• Grants dispersed by the Philadelphia Water Department (manual data refresh)
• Stormwater management practice polygons by the Philadelphia Water Department
• Zoning base districts by the Department of Planning and Development
• Pier certifications by the Department of Licenses and Inspections (automated release)

For future updates, the city may change its approach, according to Tim Haynes, the city’s chief data officer and geographic information officer. The city has spent the last year working on upgrades, such as automating some of the manual data updates.

“We’re currently reconfiguring our dashboards to better reflect the capabilities of this new system, which will include moving away from our historical ‘automation’ and ‘refresh’ metrics,” Haynes told Technical.ly.

More new data than last year, but far from the peak

Philadelphia increased its total updates by 75% in Q1 2025 compared to the same time last year.

While 2024 saw a notable dip from 2023 — 95 updates in 2023 versus 68 in 2024 — this quarter-over-quarter uptick could be a positive sign for the project’s future.

The City of Philadelphia is still making strides in its data efforts, according to Madison Lee, director of communications at the Office of Innovation and Technology.

“The city already had a central data warehouse for 15 years,” Lee said, “we’ve just, more recently, been building additional infrastructure to automate.”

Other data stakeholders, however, say there has been slowing enthusiasm from the city for its open data project since its origin more than a decade ago. So, they’re taking parts of the effort into their own hands.

Volunteers at OpenDataPhilly have stepped up to collect the releases in one place to make them easier to sift through. Plus, in 2024, the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia received a $75,000 grant from Every Voice, Every Vote for its own data project using the City of Philadelphia’s releases. The effort brings together public data, community-collected datasets and academic research all in one place to foster more collaborative visualizations and insights.

The city established its open data program in 2012 after Mayor Michael Nutter issued an executive order. The initial goal was to publish city datasets in an open data portal, hire a chief data officer, establish an open data working group and appoint a data governance advisory board. The executive order also called for an open government plan. Within a year, the city achieved six out of 10 of its original goals. 

Automating its data system has been a priority for the city as it moves the information to a central warehouse to update it at a faster pace. Then, employees will be freed up to work on projects that present data in a useful way, Kistine Carolan, senior program manager with the Philadelphia Office of Innovation and Technology, previously told Technical.ly.

“Creating an interactive dashboard where people can explore the data, particularly if there’s spatial information related to where they live or where they’re working,” Carolan said, “really allows a broader audience to engage with this data and use it in meaningful ways.”