New report measures and ranks national road safety in the top 100 metros by analyzing the most important usage metrics, from VMT and truck activity to pedestrian risk.
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 26, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- StreetLight Data, Inc. (StreetLight), a subsidiary of Jacobs and the leading transportation analytics company providing insights into how people, goods, and services move, today unveiled the U.S. Safe Streets Index: How America's metros rank across five key road safety factors. A first of its kind, this comprehensive new report ranks the 100 most populated metros overall and across key impact factors, including VMT, speed measures, pedestrian risk, and trucking activity.
To produce the U.S. Safe Streets Index, StreetLight harnessed billions of data points nationwide to study five of the most important usage metrics impacting safety: Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT), Speed Differential, Speed-based Pedestrian Risk, Truck Activity, and Residential Speeding.
Featured findings from StreetLight's U.S. Safe Streets Index, include:
- Larger metros tend to perform better overall for roadway safety, despite popular misconceptions that big cities are more dangerous. New York ranks first overall for roadway safety.
- Boston is the only metro studied that scores in the top 30 across all five safety factors.
- New York, Boston, and Washington D.C. are the large metros (population >5 million) within the top quintile for low pedestrian risk.
- The best-performing metros for managing residential speeds are concentrated in the Upper Midwest and Northeast and include metros of all sizes.
- Eight of the top 10 metros for low VMT exposure also rank in the top quintile for overall road safety performance.
- The best-performing metros for truck activity are concentrated in the Upper Midwest, Great Lakes, and select Northeastern regions, typically metros that are not major freight hubs or port gateways.
"Road safety is a top issue for planners, engineers, and consultants, but the way communities build and operate their transportation infrastructure varies dramatically," said Kevin Hathaway, StreetLight CEO. "The U.S. Safe Streets Index offers us an opportunity to identify and study metros across the country to understand the best levers for improvement. This Index is StreetLight's latest effort to connect the dots between once disparate or unavailable data to deliver actionable intelligence to improve transportation safety and operations."
Data-driven analytics can help pinpoint the most high-risk locations across an entire multimodal network to prioritize the right road safety improvements. With StreetLight's tools, agencies and consultants can power any phase of safety planning with validated data that leads to better decisions. This includes instant volumes and speeds across the network to enact targeted safety interventions, granular hard braking and acceleration data to proactively identify and address road safety risks, or multimodal bike/ped/truck insights to ensure a comprehensive approach.
To learn more, the U.S. Safe Streets Index: How America's metros rank across five key road safety factors report is available for free download now.
About StreetLight, a Jacobs Company
StreetLight Data, Inc. ("StreetLight") empowers transportation professionals to plan, build, and operate smarter mobility infrastructure through a comprehensive suite of analytics and data solutions. Powered by billions of data points from connected vehicles, mobile devices, sensors, probe data, and other sources, StreetLight's proprietary Route Science® engine—powered by machine learning and AI—transforms data into contextualized, multimodal travel patterns that reveal how people and goods move across the transportation network, providing continuous, network-wide visibility and enabling faster, data-driven decisions. StreetLight was acquired by Jacobs as a wholly owned subsidiary in February 2024.
Media Contact
Peter Evers, StreetLight Data, 1 (415) 322-8150, [email protected], www.streetlightdata.com
SOURCE StreetLight Data
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