Data That Saves Lives

About: The Town of Cary is one of North Carolina’s fastest-growing municipalities, with a community that expects responsive, data-informed local government. Cary’s transportation division covers a wide range of responsibilities: signal operations, safety analysis, traffic calming, and multimodal programming. The team is lean by design, and the workload is not.

Challenge: Crash data was available, but onerous to pull together. Traffic records required manual review before staff could act on them. That slowed responses to public inquiries, obscured true safety conditions, and made it harder to identify emerging issues across the network. Meanwhile, the volume of work kept growing while the team did not. Getting data into a usable form for warrant analyses, citizen inquiries, and capital programming took more time than the department could consistently afford.

Solution: The operational impact was immediate. Signal warrant analyses that once took hours now take minutes. With roughly two dozen analyses completed each year, that time savings compounds quickly. Staff can respond to questions from residents and council members in real time, with confidence. The platform became part of daily operations: triaging 311 concerns, supporting all-way stop warrant reviews, and guiding Cary’s newly restructured Multimodal Improvements Program.

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That speed is built on a trusted data foundation. Automated validation and correction eliminates mislocated and miscoded crashes before analysis begins, and high-precision geospatial analysis reveals true intersection-level safety patterns without manual review.

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By analyzing crash frequency alongside crash rates, the team moved beyond simple hotspot identification to a prioritization approach that separates genuine risk from statistical noise. That methodology led directly to a capital project at an intersection adjacent to the municipal building that would never have surfaced under the old process.

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“We’re a lean team, and this platform lets us punch above our weight. I’ve had it open in the middle of council meetings. It changes how you show up for those conversations.”

— David Spencer, Transportation Engineering Manager, Town of Cary, NC