Staff present Q1 injury collision data; Commission asks for clearer trend reporting and heat-map focus

City staff presented Albany’s first-quarter 2025 injury-collision data on July 24, outlining a preliminary count of collisions reported to the police department and a separate injury-focused snapshot from the Transportation Injury Mapping System (TIMS).

Staff reported that city police monthly reports documented 22 collisions for the quarter while TIMS — which focuses on injury collisions and updates later — showed 16 injury collisions for the same period. The TIMS snapshot included one collision classified as a serious injury and five pedestrian-involved collisions; TIMS identified one bicycle-involved collision.

Staff identified the serious-injury incident as a crash at Brighton Avenue and San Pablo Avenue in which an electric scooter was struck while crossing outside a marked crosswalk just north of the Brighton intersection at about 1 a.m.; the TIMS/police summary attributed fault to the scooter operator. Staff also noted pedestrian-involved collisions at San Pablo and Portland, Solano and Ventura, and Marin and Peralta, and a vehicle-bicycle collision at Masonic and Solano. For the quarter, staff reported 149 citations issued and seven DUI arrests in the monthly police tallies.

The presentation included a citywide heat map and multiple TIMS-generated charts. Commissioners praised the heat map as a useful spatial planning tool but questioned the legibility of the quarter-by-quarter line charts and asked staff to provide annual trend charts or stacked-bar visualizations that make multi-year patterns easier to interpret. Commissioners also requested that staff provide the underlying spreadsheet so commissioners can analyze or re-visualize the data themselves.

A number of commissioners asked staff to exclude freeway incidents (staff noted two freeway collisions in the quarter) when analyzing city-street safety trends because freeway crashes can skew small-city totals and are often outside local traffic-control jurisdiction. Staff said TIMS can be sliced in multiple ways and agreed to refine reporting: exclude freeway incidents for city-only trend views, prioritize the heat map for the Active Transportation Plan, and provide a clearer annual-trend chart (commission feedback favored stacked bars or annual aggregates over noisy quarterly lines). Justin (City staff) said TIMS provides a later, mappable snapshot that can show additional injury reports not yet in monthly police tallies.

Commissioners and staff also discussed which collision types to prioritize for follow-up (for example, vehicle turns that strike pedestrians, and right-on-red conflicts) and possible actions the city can take as part of the Active Transportation Plan. Staff asked for feedback about preferred chart formats and reporting cadence; several commissioners advised an annual summary and targeted quarterly updates for hotspots.

Staff will return with updated figures and improved visualizations; commissioners requested that future reports explicitly separate freeway collisions from city-street collisions, include collision-type breakdowns, and supply downloadable data for independent inspection.