As a part of a project examining the effects of COVID-19 restrictions on road-related injuries in BC, researchers searched for publicly available road traffic data and found numerous publicly available data sources. The largest data source is the BC Traffic Data Program, which includes over 900 sites throughout the province and reports on volume, speed, and length data. Additional data sources include the traffic volumes from the City of Vancouver and the City of Surrey. The available data required extensive cleaning prior to being usable in any analyses.
In the context of COVID-19, researchers found a stark decrease in road traffic volumes and a slight increase in vehicle speed at the onset of the pandemic, compared to the pre-pandemic period. Overall, this work demonstrated the vast amounts of publicly available road traffic data across BC. These data may be valuable for future road safety research, as it can be used as a denominator, offset variable, or covariate in road-related injury research. These data are limited in that vehicle speed data are only available from the BC Traffic Data program, which largely consists of highways and other intermunicipal roadways.
This webinar is presented Breanna Nelson, PhD Candidate. Breanna is a PhD candidate at UBC and a graduate research assistant with the BCIRPU. She has spent the last 3 years working on road safety research projects. A large portion of that work has involved finding road traffic data across British Columbia.
Date: Thursday, March 27, 2025, 10:00am PST
Location: Virtually via Zoom
