Standardizing Vehicle Travel Speed Data for Road Safety

In 2022, almost 50,000 people died in road crashes in the United States, with speeding implicated in 29% of these fatalities. Despite known links between vehicle speed and crash occurrence and severity, there are no federal guidelines for collecting vehicle travel speed (VTS) data. Cities with open VTS data are using unstandardized datasets, which complicates large-scale and cross-jurisdictional analysis. We conducted a qualitative assessment of open data repositories for the 25 largest U.S. cities, using a framework of knowledge representation, evaluated twelve metadata components, and determined the potential usability of these datasets. Our knowledge representation framework includes five data elements: speed metric, timestamp, geospatial representation, posted speed and vehicle type. Findings show that one-quarter of these cities have open VTS datasets. Of those cities, none has a VTS dataset containing all the elements defined in our framework. This suggests the need to design information policy standards for the collection and sharing of open VTS data.