Modernizing Data Systems in Environmental Public Health: A Blueprint for Action
California: Traffic Exposure Mapping Implementation
Outcomes and Benefits The updated Traffic Tool has improved access to environmental exposure data and supports public health practitioners, researchers, and planners in evaluating traffic-related health risks such as asthma and cardiovascular con- ditions. It enables more equitable urban planning by identifying high-traffic, high-vulnerability areas. Lessons Learned Sustainable design and partnerships are key to success. Early investment in standardized data infrastructure and intuitive design significantly improved user engagement and long-term usability. California’s experience demonstrates the value of updating legacy systems with flexible, user-centric solutions that align with evolving data needs.
California’s Environmental Public Health Tracking Program, in partnership with the Public Health Institute and CDC’s National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program, modernized its legacy Traffic Tool by developing an inter- active, cloud-based web application. The new platform incorporates standard- ized traffic exposure data from Caltrans, including daily vehicle miles traveled (DVMT) and annual average daily traffic (AADT). This tool enables users, from researchers to community members, to search for any location in the state and visualize traffic data within customizable buffers. The design allows for public accessibility through a responsive interface. Challenges and Solutions The modernization effort confronted a familiar hurdle: California lacked a sin - gle, consistent source of traffic data. Replacing the retired 2007 Traffic Tool in- volved assembling a statewide dataset from multiple Caltrans sources—notably the Traffic Census AADT counts and the Highway Performance Management System AADT estimates—and ensuring that these disparate data sets could work together. To solve this problem, the program aligned and joined the two datasets, standardized road segments using Caltrans’ functional classification scheme, and interpolated missing values. This process allowed them to calculate the DVMT for each segment by multiplying AADT estimates by segment length. The result is a harmonized 2019 traffic volume road network that underpins the new Traffic Tool. The tool’s public interface lets users query DVMT and AADT for any location in California and reflects the project’s goal, highlighted by CDC as “building a standardized and sustainable statewide data set on vehicle traffic” accessible to the public, researchers, and environmental health services.
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