Brabant Enhances Traffic Safety with Data from Interpolis

Every year, hundreds of thousands of minor accidents remain outside the official statistics. Think of small collisions in parking lots or accidents involving and between cyclists, e-bikers, or mopeds. Because the damage extent of these accidents is usually minor, no emergency services are involved, making them a blind spot for road managers. As a result, they lack crucial information to proactively make infrastructure safer.

Insurers often have this information. Therefore, Interpolis and the Province of North Brabant are now entering into a collaboration. Interpolis shares the fully anonymized data set containing all Brabant-relevant accidents from the past four years with the province. It concerns information about nearly 60,000 accidents. An initial inventory shows that many thousands of these were not yet on the radar of the province and municipalities. Thus, Interpolis information is very valuable for road managers.

Unique in the Netherlands

For the first time in the Netherlands, an insurer and a decentralized government join forces in this way. With the collaboration, Interpolis aims to contribute to general traffic safety, says CEO Uco Vegter: “Our goal is to actively use our knowledge and data together with the province to improve traffic safety. Our role obviously goes far beyond paying out claims. By providing insight into where accidents frequently occur, we help the province make it safer for everyone.”

“Every accident on our Brabant roads is one too many,” says Deputy Stijn Smeulders (mobility). “That is why we must do everything to make our traffic safer. The data we now receive from Interpolis will help us and the Brabant municipalities in the future to apply improvements very specifically at street level. I think it is wonderful that we can lead the way in data-driven work on traffic safety in this way.”

This unique collaboration originated within Interpolis, where Twan Jansen (Data Consultant), as initiator, played a key role. The seemingly simple question “What do we actually do with those damage locations we enter into our system?” grew into an innovative project with societal impact. He developed a model linking damage information to government data.

Careful Consideration

To safeguard privacy at all times, the shared data is fully anonymized and cannot be traced back to individuals in any way. The province analyzes the data and combines it with other information sources, such as traffic intensity, emergency services data, and road characteristics. The insights form an important, but not the only, basis for possible infrastructural adjustments. Decision-making remains a careful consideration of multiple factors.

“If this collaboration proves successful, we hope to roll out this approach nationwide, thereby further contributing to improving traffic safety and countering the increasing number of traffic victims,” says Uco Vegter. At the same time, the Province of North Brabant hopes that more insurers will share their data, creating an even more complete picture.”