2021

Sydney James (sydney.james17@gmail.com), University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Laurence Rilett, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Native American Reservations have been consistently found to underreport crash data due to reporting barriers including lack of training, law enforcement understaffing, hardware and software issues, and political concerns.  Funding allocated for state and federally sponsored safety programs relies heavily on crash rates to identify areas that require increased funding.  Thurston County, Nebraska is located entirely on land designated for Native American Reservations.  Crash data from 2000 to 2018 indicates a dramatic decrease in the number of reported crashes and an increase in the number of reported fatal crashes.  In order to determine if this is due to an underreporting of total crashes, an analysis was performed comparing Thurston County to three other similar counties in Nebraska.  Thurston County reported the largest decrease in total reported crashes and was the only county to report an increase in the number of fatal crashes.  Thurston also reported the highest annual average number of fatal crashes compared to the three most similar counties.  Although these numbers would suggest that Thurston County is underreporting crash data, more work needs to be done to conclusively determine if the data is incomplete and if so, by how much.

Elias Sandoval-Clarimon, Eastern Washington University

Nathan Belz, University of Alaska, Fairbanks

Alaska has hundreds of communities that are not "on the highway system." 　Some of these are small cities and villages, sometimes called "rural hubs." Typically these have an asphalt runway and some local highways. However, in these hubs and all the smaller communities, the road system is limited, and automobiles and small trucks share the few available roads with ATVs and snowmachines. In the winter, the rivers are used by snow machines and often ATVs and sometimes highway vehicles. The hubs generally have Alaska State Troopers or local police while the smaller villages and communities have Village Public Safety Officers (VPSOs) or no formal law enforcement presence. Thus in rural areas both the nature of crashes and their reporting are likely to vary from the standard. Common areas and discrepancies between crash reporting injury/fatality reporting systems were analyzed for select Alaskan communities and villages using standard crash reporting system used by the Alaska Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities (ADOT&PF) and　 non-standard data through the Alaska Trauma Registry, police reports, and local newspapers and media where available.