Benefits to the Highway Safety Community

• Support state and local highway safety programs by providing more consistent and accurate data
  
• Generate comparable information to more accurately identify where resources could be applied among important programs, provide for better performance measures, and support evaluation of effectiveness of programs
  
• Facilitate linkage to medical outcome data, thereby helping identify the cost of traffic crashes and, ultimately, who pays
  
• Standardize information for states to accurately compare themselves with their neighbors to evaluate their highway safety problems and to help set joint program priorities
  
• Facilitate development of common software for crash data entry, access, and analysis
  
• Facilitate collection and coding of crash data for the Federal systems, most of which are used by state and local agencies, possibly leading to further revisions and economies in how the data are collected