FRA launches new dashboard to illustrate trespass and suicide data
Written by Mischa Wanek-Libman, editor
Federal Railroad Administration
The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has launched a new dashboard intended to help visualize trespassing and suicide data along railroad rights-of-way.
FRA notes that more than 400 trespass fatalities occur nationally and nearly as many injuries occur each year making trespassing a leading cause of rail-related deaths in the U.S. FRA is committed in its effort to reduce trespassing and suicide incidents along railroad property and the Trespass and Suicide Dashboard will serve as one of many tools.
FRA says the Trespass and Suicide Dashboard will help analyze trespass and suicide incidents and allows users to visually interact with the data collected.
The agency has designed the dashboard to answer the following core questions about trespassing and suicide incidents:
- Where have trespassing incidents occurred both nationally and locally?
- What railroads are involved in trespassing incidents?
- What are the details surrounding trespassing incidents (e.g. trespasser age, day of week, time of day, physical act before casualty and the event that caused the casualty)
- Where do suicide incidents occur nationally?
- What is the trend of suicides incidents by year?
The user-friendly dashboard is divided into five sections – Trespass Overview; Trespass Detail; Suicide Overview; Suicide Detail and Trespass & Suicide Prevention – and provides data going back to 2011 for suicides and 2008 for trespassing.
The dashboard visualizes data generated from the FRA Safety Database. That ability to provide a visualization of numerous data points within the FRA Safety Database is a key feature notes Warren Flatau, FRA senior public affairs specialist.
“Much like the GX Dash tool launched earlier this year, the GIS interface allows users to easily view a snapshot of regional/state/local occurrences without performing multiple data queries in the database,” said Flatau.
