TransBASE

An online database for understanding and addressing transportation-related health issues

TransBASE is an online database and analytical tool that facilitates a data-driven approach to understanding and addressing transportation-related health issues. The San Francisco Department of Public Health’s Program on Health, Equity and Sustainability (SFDPH-PHES) has developed TransBASE to inform solutions to transportation problems. It currently includes over 200 spatially referenced variables from multiple agencies and across a range of geographic scales, including infrastructure, transportation, zoning, sociodemographic, and collision data, all linked to an intersection or street segment.

It utilizes an open source relational database management system designed to provide analytical solutions for transportations problems in an effort to inform public and private efforts to improve transportation system safety and public health. The long-term goal is for TransBase to serve as the central data repository for all public health-related transportation data; to be a free and open data resource for the general public to use; and to support interagency collaboration, data standards, and data sharing within San Francisco.

TransBASE’s innovative features support multiple city safety initiatives such as Vision Zero – San Francisco’s policy and commitment to eliminate all traffic-related fatalities by 2024. This includes:

  • Spatially identifying high-injury corridors for pedestrians and cyclists for targeted engineering, education and enforcement safety efforts.
  • Informing Walk First – an inter-agency collaboration to create San Francisco’s Pedestrian Safety Capital Improvements Investment Strategy   with crash data linked to street, transit, infrastructure, land use, and population factors for systematic, citywide analyses of crash patterns.
  • Harnessing data into a centralized system for monitoring and evaluation.
  • Developing multivariate models to identify environmental correlates of pedestrian injuries to support the City’s prioritization of areas and countermeasures for safety improvements.

TransBASE is currently used by San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.