Real-Time Traffic Incident Reports
This page provides context for the data reported on the Real-Time Traffic Incidents dataset on the Open Data Portal. That dataset provides information on active traffic-related incidents reported to the Austin Police, Austin Fire Department, Aviation Police, and Travis County Sheriff.
For further context, see:
- Data Trends and Analysis
- Data Trends and Analysis
Information is updated every 5 minutes.
BACKGROUND
This data set references a data feed that publishes currently active traffic incidents reported in our area. This dataset represents traffic incident data collected from multiple public safety agencies’ data. These groups include Austin Police, Austin Fire Department, Travis County Sheriff, and Aviation Police. In 2003, there was a decision to share this data to the public in order to show reported active traffic incidents that may cause traffic backups or delays and require rerouting.
CONTEXT & DATA LIMITATIONS
The source feed for this dataset refreshes every 5 minutes and only shows active traffic incidents. This open dataset captures the active traffic incidents from the source feed snapshot into a cumulative dataset. However, since this collected data consists of such snapshots, it does not constitute a full or complete representation of all traffic incidents nor do these records necessarily reflect the final status of the incidents.
Data limitations of this dataset include, but are not limited to the following:
- Any changes to the original incident record once it is no longer in the ACTIVE status will not convey over to this cumulative dataset. Ex. An address field may be updated/corrected once a safety officer is on location.
- Not all records remain open for more than the 5-minute refresh window. This means some records may never be captured. Ex. An incident entry to the system may be self-initiated by a safety agency mobile crew member and take only a few minutes to complete.
- No general standard exists for what data the safety agencies share nor how they label the incidents. The feed combines multiple agencies’ data that may not conform to the same incident types.
Please note that this collection of active incident snapshots is not a crash data report dataset. For crash level records, please see the “Vision Zero Crash Dataset” (Austin Crash Report Data - Crash Level Records).