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Truck Safety Coalition

Visualizing the FARS Data for the Truck Safety Coalition

The Truck Safety Coalition (TSC) has a national network of volunteers dedicated to providing compassionate, immediate support to survivors and families of victims of truck crashes. TSC also advocates for policy changes to prevent future deaths.

TSC routinely used data in their advocacy activities, but accessing the data was time consuming. The data lived in siloed tables or PDFs hosted on the Department of Transportation (DOT) website, making it difficult to analyze and time consuming to visualize. Customized reports had to be developed for different policy makers and stakeholders.

Excellians Amanda MakulecMarc FrankelJohn Carr and Michael Bass worked together with TSC to create an interactive dashboard TSC could use during meetings to create quick, custom reports for each policy maker. The dashboard was designed to be embedded on the TSC website for wider visibility. To achieve the TSC’s goals, the development process focused on identifying the key use cases and audiences with our TSC partners, developing an MVP for early feedback, and delivering a final product that can be refined and continuously improved by the TSC team.

The final dashboard is available on Tableau Public: https://public.tableau.com/profile/amanda.makulec#!/vizhome/FatalLargeTruckCrashesinAmerica/Overview

Potential Use Cases

The TSC dashboard showcases how legacy reports and PDFs can be transformed into engaging, interactive, data-driven tools with a user-centered design process.

Illustrative applications of this approach could include:

  • Transforming monthly financial summaries prepared in Microsoft Excel into an interactive dashboard to enable improved analysis and decision making.
  • Combining open data on renewable energy by location from multiple sources and visualizing the information on an interactive dashboard.
  • Triangulating financial data on service costs, ARHQ (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality) datasets, and patient outcome data across a hospital system as part of a quality of care assessment.
  • Automating dashboards of digital conversion funnels to identify improvement opportunities on an eCommerce website.

Read More

If you’d like to find more detailed information regarding implementation details and the design of this project, check out these two blog posts and a video testimonial: