School of Cities Knowledge Café: Data collection challenge for Vision Zero

Join the University of Toronto School of Cities for its next Knowledge Café, featuring Brice Batomen.

Traffic collisions remain a leading cause of preventable death and injury in Canada and North America. Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs), pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists, are disproportionately affected, with their share of fatalities rising from since 2010. Despite widespread adoption of Vision Zero strategies aimed at eliminating traffic deaths through systemic design changes, rigorous population-level evaluations of these interventions are lacking.

Current studies often rely on simple pre-post designs, which fail to account for temporal trends, regression to the mean, and time-varying confounders such as traffic volume and road user composition. Additionally, municipal records frequently lack precise data on intervention dates and locations, hindering robust analyses. This talk will highlight these gaps while discussing several avenues to tackle them.

About the speaker

Brice Batomen is an epidemiologist and Assistant Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. His research focuses on access to trauma care and injury prevention in Canada. His current work aims to evaluate initiatives that enhance road safety and promote active transportation through innovative data collection and analytical methods. He earned his PhD in Epidemiology at McGill University, following a Master of Science in Epidemiology at Laval University and undergraduate studies in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Dschang, Cameroon.