Podcast

Safer streets, smarter cities: How big data is driving better planning decisions

Show contributors: Kevin Hathaway, Katie Adnams, Arthur Jones
Transportation Cities & Places Highways
Head‑and‑shoulders studio portrait of a person in a blue business jacket over a light, patterned collared shirt, photographed against a plain white background.
Kevin Hathaway
CEO and General Manager, StreetLight Data | A Jacobs Company
Katie Adnams
Katie Adnams
Global Principal, Smart Places 
Read the transcript

Local authorities and city leaders are under growing pressure to reduce serious accidents, deliver visible safety improvements and prove results — often with limited budgets and competing priorities. The question is: how do you decide where to intervene first, and how do you measure what’s working, fast? 

In this episode of If/When | Jacobs, we explore how transport and city planners are pairing design and policy with data-driven insights: the kinds of inputs that help explain why risk is rising in specific places, not just where collisions happened. 

We’ll spotlight StreetLight Data’s U.S. Safe Streets Index, a report that ranks the 100 most populated metros using roadway-usage factors that influence safety, including Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT), Speed Differential, Speed-based Pedestrian Risk, Truck Activity and Residential Speeding. The report is powered by billions of data points to help agencies understand exposure, speed behavior and risk in a way that supports faster, more targeted decisions. 

Our guests for this episode bring the data-to-decisions story to life for planners and local governments. We’re joined by Kevin Hathaway, CEO & GM of StreetLight Data, and Katie Adnams, Global Principal & Associate Director, Smart Places at Jacobs. Together, they unpack what safer streets and smarter city designs look like when you combine planning judgment with network-wide visibility, and how councils can use these insights to prioritize interventions, strengthen business cases and track outcomes over time. 

 

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Why is road safety about more than speed?  

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What data sources can make streets safer? 

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How can cities spot risks before accidents happen? 

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What role will AI play in safer transport planning?  

 

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In Jacobs’ series of interviews with some of the industry’s leading subject matter experts, inspirational leaders and trailblazers, we pull back the curtain on some of the hottest topics and trends across critical infrastructure, climate resiliency, water, advanced manufacturing, energy transition, sustainability, technology and artificial intelligence. We unpack the innovation, core values and close collaboration between Jacobs and its relationships with clients, partners and the communities in which it serves. We explore how we’re building social value across all that we do to create digitally enabled, science-based and sustainable solutions that drive climate response and human wellness.

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