Sustainable Worldwide
Transportation

The Unified Tool for Mapping Opportunities for Safety Technology, or UTMOST, is a model of crash data that allows for easy visualization of the combined effects of several safety countermeasures. It also provides for quantifying safety effects in several ways, such as overall number of crashes versus estimated economic loss. UTMOST is designed to be modular, and it is being built and modified in stages. A website (accessible to members) provides a working implementation of UTMOST.

The baseline dataset in the current version of UTMOST consists of the police-reported crashes in the United States in 2006. When the user chooses countermeasures to evaluate, UTMOST currently predicts outcomes as if all vehicles or occupants were potentially affected by the countermeasure (e.g., a new technology is assumed to be immediately present throughout the entire current fleet). The user can choose the estimated effectiveness of the countermeasure, given that it is present, and see the potential effect on crash outcomes if all vehicles or drivers were affected. In the near future, we plan to expand UTMOST to incorporate changes over time—including demographic changes, fleet changes, and changes in driving habits.