Comment from Matthew Miller
Matthew MillerSupportIndividual
Summary: The commenter supports the proposed action by providing specific recommendations for improving Bureau of Transportation Statistics data collection, including a greater focus on infrastructure condition and safety analysis. They also advocate for technical improvements such as API access, unique dataset IDs for version control, and better archiving of historical data.
In my world, the overwhelming government need for data at the MPO and RPO/COG level is for data to satisfying MAPS/FAST Act reporting requirements.
More data on Infrastructure condition would be welcome. We have a much talked about maintenance crisis and pending funding crisis. We make decisions on what we measure, and infrastructure condition is important, so we should do more measurement of it.
Much more focus on safety would be welcome. Right now, analysis is at a very basis level of "someone died here" with minimal analysis of causal factors beyond AADT. A FEMA-style document on "How to analyze safety data" would be welcome, with a specific focus on urban arterials, intersections, and pedestrians.
Being able to access data via API is preferred. I absolutely love tidycensus (in R); it has saved me huge amounts of time downloading, unzipping and filing data, and it's ability to 'cache' data rather than re-downloading when I re-run a script has been great.
API-based data is great, but if you don't have a good archive of past data I can trust (and which will remain comparable in the future) I have the download--I've even had to write custom scripts to download data from live servers, because I can't get a download. Vintage management is key -- If I download the same thing at two different dates, and my boss says "Why is this different", I need to be able to explain why, which means every time a dataset gets updated, it needs a (user accessible) unique ID.
If I open a map using experience.arcgis.com, I want to be able to download the data from it, not have to try to find it someplace else within the website. Given all the data in the web applications is publicly available, this should be a default.
A BTS GitHub (of gov equivalent thereof) of scripts designed to interact with a putative BTS API would be welcome.
Why does the downloadable NTAD data say "coming soon", with a 2021 date? <https://www.bts.gov/geospatial/national-transportation-atlas-database/archivedata> It's a wall I've hit multiple times when hunting BTS geodata. S
Obtain you own BTS domain on BlueSky, and mirror to Twitter using IFTTT or the like--more control, better archiving. (Twitter is great for announcing things, but remarkably bad at making it possible to find something you saw and want to see again).