State Traffic Records Integration for National Safety Performance Management

In 2023, 40,901 people died and an estimated 2.44 million were injured in motor-vehicle crashes on U.S. roads. Executing the National Roadway Safety Strategy with precision — allocating countermeasures where they will save the most lives, overseeing grant performance, and detecting which interventions work — requires a national performance-management infrastructure built on high-quality, integrated state traffic-safety data.

That infrastructure does not exist. The foundational GAO assessment (GAO-10-454) found the integration performance measure — the degree to which the six state data systems are linked — was met only 13 percent of the time, the weakest dimension by nearly four to one. This paper proposes a national data-integration architecture: a common data model and a National Traffic Safety data fabric.

• In 2023, 40,901 people died and roughly 2.44 million were injured on U.S. roads.
• GAO-10-454 found state data-system integration met performance measures only 13 percent of the time.
• Cross-domain analysis across crash, roadway, driver, vehicle, citation, and injury data is not possible at national scale today.
• The paper proposes a common data model and a National Traffic Safety data fabric.
• The architecture supports NHTSA trend analysis, state comparison, grant oversight, and countermeasure evaluation.