AASHTO Journal - AASHTOWare, Numetric Form Safety Software Alliance

AASHTOWare, a division of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, and Utah-based Numetric, Inc., are joining forces to release a co-branded safety software product that will be available for licensing to customers on July 1.

AASHTOWare – which offers a suite of transportation software products delivered through a collaborative business model with state departments of transportation across the country – is working with Numetric to jointly deliver a comprehensive toolset in the traffic safety analytics space built on a “software-as-a-service” or SaaS platform.

“This alliance between AASHTOWare and Numetric will help enhance the user experience and open the door to future innovation,” said Jim Tymon, AASHTO’s executive director, in a statement. “Safety is top priority for every transportation agency and we are proud to deliver a product that will serve as a helpful tool for our members to meet that priority.”

The timing of the alliance will enable AASHTO to begin an orderly two-year sunset period for its existing AASHTOWare Safety Analyst software package, which is 18 years old and nearing the end of its lifecycle.

Not only will the new AASHTOWare Safety “powered by Numetric” co-branded software be functionally equivalent to AASHTOWare’s existing offering, it includes enhanced navigation, a geographic information system interface, faster calculations, and new tools such as Google Street View, which provides the capability to view an individual site.

The new product’s SaaS platform will also allow agency personnel to access it without having to download software onto their computers, allowing for far wider usage across any licensing organization.

“Numetric is thrilled to be working with AASHTOWare and to be part of this new alliance,” noted Nate Bowler, CEO of Numetric. “Transportation agencies have the unique opportunity to combine the world-class traffic safety expertise of AASHTO with Numetric’s industry-leading analytics platform into a single solution that is both easy to deploy and easy to use. We are very excited by the potential of this alliance to help us all achieve our shared traffic safety goals.”

Jan Edwards, project director for AASHTOWare, noted in an interview with the AASHTO Journal that a critical piece of this new offering is the data cleanup activity Numetric will perform for product customers as part of this alliance.

“To initiate the implementation process, Numetric will work with transportation agencies and perform any needed data clean-up based on agency defined parameters to ensure it can be properly used by the analytic tools,” she explained. “This will ensure that the agency can utilize the software as quickly as possible and won’t have to rely on in-house resources to clean and organize their data.”

Edwards said one of the biggest barriers to effectively implementing transportation safety software has been the quality of the data fed into them – information that comes from multiple sources and may not have been consistently formatted over the years it was collected.

“That is why this data cleanup activity Numetric will perform as part of this alliance is vital,” she added as the new cloud-based SaaS platform will consume data from internal and external databases to analyze crash and location data, along with roadway design and countermeasure information, to power a number of purpose-built applications.

“It will allow state DOTs to more quickly use data to drive changes that improve traffic safety – analyzing roadway and intersection design data along with vehicle crash data to determine which specific countermeasures will be best suited to improve safety from a cost-benefit perspective,” Edwards said.

Look for details about the new AASHTOWare Safety “powered by Numetric” co-branded software within the new 2021 AASHTOWare product catalog, which will be available in May at https://www.aashtoware.org/. Questions on the new software can be directed to AASHTOWare Safety Program Manager Ryan Fragapane at 202-624-3632 or rfragapane@aashto.org