The World Bank

DRIVER Road Safety
Mobile App and
Dashboard

A person holding a smartphone with the DRIVER mobile app on-screen in front of a traffic accident.

Road crashes are a global epidemic, with reports showing that more than 1.25 million people are killed on the world’s roadways each year and many millions more are injured or disabled. In collaboration with The World Bank, we researched, prototyped, and deployed an open source platform to mitigate road accidents through road incident data management and analysis.

A Collaborative Approach to Solve The Right Problem

DRIVER, the Data for Road Incident Visualization, Evaluation, and Reporting platform, was brought to life through active collaboration with multiple countries and government organizations. Starting with research in the Philippines, our team met with a number of police, road safety, public works, and other groups in Manila to understand the process for reporting and evaluating road accidents. After a series of small group interviews, onsite observation sessions, and interagency workshops, DRIVER's initial concept was conceived.

Michael Tedeschi facilitating a design thinking workshop with participants around a table with sticky notes in the background.
We facilitated design thinking workshops during our prototyping phase with teams in Manila, Philippines and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, to ideate and prototype concepts.

DRIVER had several initial goals: aggregate data collection across agencies to make it easier to coordinate improvement efforts, streamline the process for data entry in the field and at agency headquarters (working with often outdated or inconsistency hardware and software constraints), and use machine learning to identify road "blackspots"—locations where accidents are most likely to occur—and model potential interventions. To define the scope and align several government agencies, we shared our research findings through a series of design thinking workshops onsite in Manila that focused on feature prioritization and defining an early prototype to create and test. Over one week, we were able to rapidly prototype and test concepts for DRIVER's initial insights dashboard and mobile apps using interactive prototyping tools on both desktop and mobile wireframes.

Want to learn more?

Curious about the research that kicked off this project? Read the World Bank's report to learn more about the global impact of road accidents on urban environments.

Creating a Global Solution

While the Philippines served as the pilot for DRIVER, the goal of the platform was to create a white-label, open source solution that could be deployed by government agencies globally. The platform was designed to accommodate both left-to-right and right-to-left languages, and was deployed in Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Laos, Bangladesh, Brazil, and Mumbai. A universal design approach was taken to create a platform that would work across cultures and languages. The mobile app was designed for Android devices, the most common system for individuals in the field for reporting road accidents on the fly (instead of capturing notes by hand and later transcribing them into outdated, local databases).

The DRIVER dashboard features information that analysts would need to see at a glance.
The DRIVER dashboard features information that analysts would need to see at a glance.

Saving Lives All Over the World

The impact of DRIVER is saving lives globally. Transportation agencies, highway patrols, public works departments, and other road safety organizations are able to use the dashboard tools to analyze road safety incidents at a glance. DRIVER’s statistical tools enable users to identify high-incident areas, forecast the potential for new incidents over time, and monitor infrastructure interventions in crash-prone areas to support future safety planning. In December 2018, the Philippines National Police Highway Patrol Group was recognized with the ASEAN Road Safety Award for Southeast Asia for using DRIVER to ensure evidence-based interventions that are positively impacting road safety.