NASID Conference DAY 1:
Data, Technology, and Networking
Traffic safety advocates and experts from across the country gathered at the Renaissance Arlington Capital Hotel in Virginia on Monday, to kick off the first day of the National Alliance to Stop Impaired Driving (NASID) Conference. Over the course of the day, key advocates shared challenges and outlined strategies and tools to undertake the critical task of eliminating impaired driving and saving lives. The three-day conference kicked off with a large focus on leveraging data and technology to fully comprehend the prevalence of impaired driving—the true scope of which remains unknown—and mitigate the problem. Here are some key takeaways from the day:
- With the election behind us and as a new administration prepares to take office under President-elect Donald Trump, the Department of Transportation is on the brink of a leadership shift. But speaking to the NASID conference audience, Jane Terry, Director of the Office of Impaired Driving and Occupant Protection for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) stressed that she views the fight against impaired driving as a bipartisan battle that will continue—regardless of who is in office. “The President will be sworn in, and we fully expect we’ll have a new team at DOT… We don’t know who those people are going to be yet, but I’m convinced that no matter who they are, they don’t want people to die on our roads,” Terry, said. “We’ll continue to do a lot of the things that we have done for decades… I have not met a person who’s in public life who doesn’t enjoy meeting with the stakeholder community, and that’s all of you.”
- Given this, what should advocates and stakeholders tackling impaired driving focus on over the course of the next two to three years? At the top of the list, Jennifer Conlon, Senior Highway Safety Specialist of the Impaired Driving Division at NHTSA, argues, is continued support for law enforcement—the “boots on the ground”—in their effort to identify and prevent impaired driving. Additionally, Conlon added, there needs to be a strong focus on prevention through the education of individuals at earlier stages in life through high school and college programs while also expanding access to transportation alternatives, such as ride-share apps, among others.
- While the data shows that impaired driving accounts for roughly one-third of driving fatalities, the reality is that the true breadth of the problem remains unknown. Ending it will require ongoing incorporation of technology, with the goal of not only prevention but also expanding data sets to buttress comprehension of impaired driving. Preventive technology could take the form of systems that passively detect impairment and prevent them from starting in the first place; the hope, however, is that such systems could also be used to close gaps in data.
- When it comes to impaired driving data, there is a concern that the current methods of collection underestimate the scope of the problem, but other gaps also exist. As Dr. Bob Scopatz, the Senior Transportation Analyst at civil engineering company Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, explained more data—around impaired crashes, not just fatalities, could help experts better understand causation, not just correlation. “We’re at best talking about contributing factors and then often mere presence [of drugs or alcohol],” Scopatz said. “So we’ve got a lot of gaps, and because we have limited funding, we have to decide where we’re going to fill the gaps and how best to do so.”
- As with all new technologies, there is, of course, the issue of data privacy. And privacy, Adonne Washington, Policy Counsel on Data, Mobility, Location for the Future of Privacy Forum, argued, remains paramount. “The way that you deal with privacy matters because it’s not necessarily why it matters to you as an individual, it’s why it matters to somebody else who can’t make a decision about it…. You have to take that into every consideration about the data,” Washington said, but added— “safety and privacy can absolutely exist at the same time.”
Building on Day 1, Day 2 sessions at the NASID conference will dive into what the existing data tells us about impaired driving—from demographic data to statistics and from detection to prevention. Among the panelists on deck are Dr. Sarah E. Nelson, Director of Research, Division on Addiction & Associate Professor, Cambridge Health Alliance, Harvard Medical School and Julie Seitz, Project Director, All Rise Impaired Driving Solutions. Other sessions include experts in detection and enforcement such as Rob Duckworth, Program Specialist at SoToxa and the Honorable Kate Huffman, National Judicial Fellow at the American Bar Association.