Data That Saves Lives

About: Berkshire Regional Planning Commission (BRPC) is the regional MPO serving 32 municipalities across Berkshire County, Massachusetts. It's a large, rural network of communities with real transportation safety needs and little-to-no in-house engineering staff for a small planning team responsible for coordinating safety work across the entire county.

Challenge: BRPC launched its Vision Zero initiative with strong public commitment, built on a consultant-produced dashboard and High Injury Network. Keeping that foundation current took real lift: crash data from MassDOT IMPACT, roadway GIS and local context required manual downloading, organizing, cleaning before any analysis could begin, and refreshing the HIN or the predictive model meant re-engaging outside consultants. Sustaining recurring safety meetings with local jurisdictions across the county was a separate challenge for a small planning team covering 32 municipalities. Sub-jurisdictions had no tools of their own to run safety analyses or produce grant-ready outputs, and staff couldn't do before/after countermeasure evaluations, corridor analysis, or equity-lens filtering without outside help.

Solution: Citian's CRASH automated the MassDOT IMPACT pipeline, so crash records are ingested, QA/QC'd, and analysis-ready without manual work. The High Injury Network now updates continuously and staff can filter by severity, mode, and equity lens. Pre-built dashboards cover Vision Zero tracking, HSIP network screening, SHSP emphasis areas, and Vulnerable Roadway Users, and an HSM-tied countermeasure recommendation engine ranks interventions by benefit-cost ratio so planners can defend prioritization without engineering staff on hand. BRPC is rolling the platform out to all 32 municipalities, giving local staff their first independent way to query crash patterns and generate their own outputs, and extending the MPO's reach as a regional resource for safety analysis. Fact sheets and dashboards pulled straight from live data now support task force meetings, council presentations, and grant submissions, strengthening HSIP and SS4A competitiveness across the region.

‍

“Citian's CRASH gives us a live picture of where risk is concentrated across the county, so we can focus our attention without taking staff time from other projects. It’s what lets us keep Berkshire STEPS up to date and grounded in real data for residents and municipal partners.”

— Nicholas Russo, Senior Transportation Planner, Berkshire Regional Planning Commission