Vision Zero Success Story – Behavioral

Background

The City of Boston’s Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM) championed the inaugural “Safest Driver Contest.” As a partnership between the Vision Zero Task Force, MONUM, and the Transportation Department, the Safest Driver Contest held its first season in 2016 and a second season in 2019. Similar contests have been held in other cities including Seattle, San Antonio, and Los Angeles.

The contest aimed to change driver behavior by offering incentives to participants who adopted safe practices while behind the wheel. Participants downloaded an app that used five performance evaluation metrics to assess each driver including braking, acceleration, speeding, cornering, and distraction. The app made calculations for these metrics based on the phone’s GPS, accelerometer, and gyroscope. The app collected and stored the monitored behaviors of individual drivers for each trip.