As the de Blasio administration rolls out new policies, advocacy groups have renewed their call to make City data more accessible and useful. The availability of quality data increases civic engagement and enables communities to identify problems like speeding and dangerous intersections. But data can do more than simply call out the need for improvements; it can even help to prevent crashes before they happen.

This week, detailed plans for the Vision Zero Initiative were unveiled, and among the 63 tactics Mayor de Blasio plans to use to eliminate traffic deaths, there were commitments to open up traffic data to ensure success:

• Publish crash and safety data on a regular basis in user-friendly format(s)
• Update technology for capturing crash data
• Develop data-driven citywide enforcement strategy

Open data and transportation advocates are coming out of a bittersweet period of data availability. Last year, a bill that would have advanced a citywide crash map failed to pass, and former Mayor Bloomberg vetoed a bill that requires the NYPD to provide more information on hit-and-run crashes (fortunately the new transportation committee swiftly passed an override of that veto last month). While advocates were hopeful that the 2012 Open Data Law would sort out the City’s messy data, the release came with a myriad of hurdles: not all agencies are meeting information deadlines, the data available is not updated frequently, and most critically, the quality and usefulness of available data is lacking.

Current transportation data is also not available in accessible formats. For example, both the NYPD and the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles present their data in static PDF files. To fill this gap, advocates have taken it upon themselves to present this data in a more useful fashion. One result was NYC Crashmapper, an interactive map created using scraped crash data from NYPD PDF files. Another is CrashStat, which was developed by Transportation Alternatives using FOIL’ed City and State crash data. There’s also Crash Stories, a crowd-sourced map recording incidents of bike and pedestrian crashes or “near-misses.”

It’s clear that transportation advocates will go above and beyond to get quality data, but where does the new administration stand? So far, it looks like a new era of transparency may be upon us.

As former Public Advocate, Mayor de Blasio fought for accountability by publishing NYC’s Worst Landlords Watch List and the Transparency Report Card, which put the spotlight on City agencies that failed to answer FOIL requests. Even de Blasio’s appointees have shown a strong commitment to transparency: new NYCDOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg supports the increasing role of open data and advanced technology in government, and new NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton made multiple recent statements promising to make NYPD crash stats more accessible.

And other elected leaders appear to be following the new administration’s lead: Manhattan Borough President Gail Brewer is a long-time open data advocate and former Chair of the Technology Committee, and newly-elected Councilmember Ben Kallos is a former technology consultant who wants to build off Mayor de Blasio’s work to make FOIL requests more transparent. And with former Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca — who advocated for transparency and more useful data while in that role — now serving as the Chair of the Technology Committee, there is another ally in the City Council working towards more accessible data.