{"id":742362,"date":"2025-04-01T19:59:59","date_gmt":"2025-04-02T02:59:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=arcnews&#038;p=742362"},"modified":"2025-04-01T16:53:41","modified_gmt":"2025-04-01T23:53:41","slug":"designing-for-good-to-save-lives-in-louisville","status":"publish","type":"arcnews","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/arcnews\/designing-for-good-to-save-lives-in-louisville","title":{"rendered":"Designing for Good to Save Lives in Louisville"},"author":5752,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","castos_file_data":"","podmotor_file_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[10372,401,1021],"tags":[164992,339072,1251,454351,484382],"arcnews_issues":[491792],"class_list":["post-742362","arcnews","type-arcnews","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gis-hero","category-government","category-transportation","tag-city-government","tag-city-planning","tag-public-safety","tag-public-service","tag-vision-zero","arcnews_issues-spring-2025","arcnews_sections-gis-people"],"acf":{"short_description":"Claire Yates is the driving force behind Vision Zero Louisville, which envisions zero roadway fatalities in the Kentucky city by 2050.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"The power of location has fascinated Claire Yates for years. Now the driving force behind Vision Zero Louisville, the Kentucky city\u2019s safety initiative that envisions zero roadway fatalities by 2050, Yates has built her career around what she calls \u201cdesigning for good.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cI became very interested in the built environment and how infrastructure and developers shape the communities that people live in,\u201d she said. \u201cI really enjoy this kind of marriage of real estate, the built environment, and human nature.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn her current roles as transportation planner for Louisville Metro Government and its Vision Zero program manager, GIS is central to Yates\u2019s work. She meticulously records and maps every crash in Louisville that results in death or serious injury and shares this data with the public. She also creates and maintains datasets that support her work. These include roads that have been or are planned to be rightsized to make driving on them safer, as well as uncontrolled, midblock crossings to help determine where new pedestrian crossing infrastructure is needed."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":742372,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"\u201cWe use GIS to determine where we should invest our limited time and resources,\u201d she said.\r\n\r\nYates has also employed GIS to bring in more than $29 million in federal funding to improve Louisville\u2019s roadways for motorists, pedestrians, and bicyclists.\r\n\r\n\u201cClaire figured out how GIS can support Louisville\u2019s efforts to improve road safety, and she has continued to use the technology to bring in more funding,\u201d said Oscar Loza, senior marketing manager for industry solutions at Esri. \u201cHer efforts\u2014and successes\u2014are inspiring.\u201d"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<h2>Flares of Geospatial Brilliance<\/h2>\r\nFresh out of college, Yates was working as a paralegal for a real estate development company, trying to decide if she wanted to become a lawyer. She concluded that practicing law wasn\u2019t her calling, and she wasn\u2019t enthusiastic about the big-box-store-anchored strip malls that the company tended to develop. But Yates did find urban planning fascinating. So she enrolled in the urban studies master\u2019s degree program at the University of Louisville. That\u2019s where she first encountered GIS.\r\n\r\nYates took an introductory GIS course and found the instructor, Bob Forbes, \u201cabsolutely wonderful,\u201d she said. \u201cHe was just very methodical\u2026about getting us acquainted with new programs and a new concept like GIS.\u201d\r\n\r\nShe was hooked, so she took several more GIS classes.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat really opened my eyes to the kind of power that GIS has and what you can do with it using different datasets,\u201d she recalled.\r\n\r\nSince learning ArcGIS technology, Yates has brought her own flare of geospatial brilliance to all the roles she\u2019s held. After graduate school, as an analyst at a commercial real estate appraisal company, Yates used GIS to enhance her market research by, for example, mapping lease rates for different submarkets of Louisville. It wasn\u2019t common to bring GIS into this type of work.\r\n\r\n\u201cI brought it in because I knew how to do it and it was kind of a value-add for me,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was also a way for me to keep my GIS skills sharp.\u201d"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":742382,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"When she joined Louisville Metro as an urban planner, she used ArcGIS StoryMaps to create compelling geospatial narratives and ArcGIS Dashboards to build informative dashboards.\r\n\r\n\u201cI created a story map of the public art collection in Louisville. I also created dashboards for initiatives like our Cool Roof Incentive Program,\u201d she said, referring to the Office of Sustainability\u2019s efforts to encourage building owners to install roofs made of cooling materials, such as asphalt shingles, to offset rising urban temperatures.\r\n\r\nAt Louisville Metro, Yates engaged in long-range and neighborhood-level planning, transportation planning, and streetscape design. Then, in the summer of 2022, the Louisville Metro Council passed its ordinance calling for zero roadway deaths by 2050. The Department of Public Works began looking for a planner to lead that initiative.\r\n\r\n\u201cI jumped at the chance and was hired to do that,\u201d Yates said."},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<h2>Safer Roads Demand Maps<\/h2>\r\nYates quickly modeled the Vision Zero initiative around the Safe System Approach. It consists of five overlapping strategies: safer roads, safer speeds, safer people, safer vehicles, and post-crash care.\r\n\r\nTo guide Vision Zero Louisville\u2019s Safer Roads strategy, Yates partnered with the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet and consulting firm Palmer Engineering to develop Louisville\u2019s first High Injury Network. This data-driven approach identifies non-interstate roadway segments that account for a disproportionate amount of a community\u2019s fatal and serious-injury crashes. Louisville\u2019s High Injury Network represents 5 percent of non-interstate miles but 55 percent of fatal and serious-injury crashes over a five-year period. The High Injury Network allows Louisville to direct limited resources toward improving safety on high-priority corridors.\r\n\r\nOne of the first tasks Yates undertook in her new job was to create the Vision Zero Louisville Dashboard. Once a month, she pulls public data on traffic collisions and maps the locations of roadway fatalities and suspected serious injuries. She also set up news alerts for searches such as \u201cLouisville pedestrian,\u201d \u201cmotorcycle crash Louisville,\u201d and \u201cfatal crash Louisville.\u201d She reviews these every day and catalogs them in her web browser. She then disaggregates the crash data to the individual level and, if possible, attaches any related news stories to the crash information on the map.\r\n\r\nIn the publicly available dashboard, users\u2014including city leaders and elected officials\u2014can click on a collision and find out more about the people involved. Yates\u2019s goal is to show that these crash statistics aren\u2019t just numbers; they represent real people whose lives have been altered and, in many cases, ended on Louisville\u2019s roads.\r\n\r\n\u201cHumans make mistakes,\u201d she said. \u201cMaybe they misjudged the amount of time that they had to make a left turn. But that mistake shouldn\u2019t be a death sentence.\u201d"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":742392,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<h2>Open, Transparent GIS Data Gets Results<\/h2>\r\nThree years in a row, Louisville\u2019s Vision Zero initiative has received federal funding to support its road safety projects\u2014in large part because of GIS analysis. This work also won Yates and the department a 2023 Special Achievement in GIS Award from Esri.\r\n\r\nIn 2022, Louisville Metro Public Works secured more than $21 million in Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) grant funding to convert several four-lane roadways into three-lane roads with designated turn lanes. The grant application featured maps and analysis revealing that fatal and serious-injury crashes occurred more frequently in disadvantaged areas.\r\n\r\nIn 2023, Louisville Metro Public Works was awarded $7.5 million through SS4A to make safety improvements to a pair of one-way streets that connect downtown with the University of Louisville. And in 2024, the city was awarded a partial SS4A grant of $800,000 to hire two new staff members to support Vision Zero.\r\n\r\n\u201cBecause GIS was central to why Louisville received this grant money, the city now makes GIS analysis a big part of its grant applications,\u201d said Loza. He credits Yates with elevating GIS to that pivotal role and making geospatial data useful, open, and fully transparent.\r\n\r\n\u201cI often remind myself and my colleagues to \u2018share and share alike,\u2019\u201d Yates said. \u201cAll of our work is owned by the community, and so therefore, the community should have access to the data and the work that they are paying for.\u201d\r\n\r\nYates said that anything she would tell her boss, she\u2019d tell the public. So she posts all her publicly available data to Louisville\u2019s open data portal. There, the public can see that the number of people killed on surface streets in Louisville in 2024 was the lowest since 2019.\r\n\r\n\u201cBut I do not rest on that,\u201d Yates said. \u201cThat is still entirely too many people losing their lives.\u201d"}],"references":null},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.9 (Yoast SEO v25.9) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Designing for Good to Save Lives in Louisville | Spring 2025 | ArcNews<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Claire Yates is the driving force behind Vision Zero Louisville, which envisions zero roadway fatalities in the Kentucky city by 2050.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/arcnews\/designing-for-good-to-save-lives-in-louisville\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" 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