ecoRI News reporter Rob Smith interviews colleague Colleen Cronin about her public records journey to requisition data from the Rhode Island Department of Transportation for a story she reported on regarding pedestrian fatalities. Two hundred dollars and nine months later, she has appealed to Rhode Island’s attorney general and is still waiting to get information about the location of the intersections where pedestrian deaths occurred.

Subscribe and listen on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast.

---

This transcript was edited for clarity and length:

Colleen Cronin 

Welcome to the Blab Lab, a twice monthly podcast from reporters of ecoRI News, where we unpack the critical environmental issues facing southern New England. I’m reporter Colleen Cronin. And today, I’m here with my colleague, Rob Smith, who is here to actually ask me some questions about a story I just wrote about crash data in Rhode Island and how it’s mostly inaccessible to the public. Hey, Rob!

Rob Smith 

Hi Colleen!

Colleen Cronin 

So I guess I turn over the reins to you. What do you want to know?

Rob Smith 

I’m in control. So, you wrote a story about the Rhode Island Department of Transportation and some crash data in the last couple of weeks. Can you tell us a little bit about the story to start off?

Colleen Cronin 

Yes, it’s a little bit of a long story, as all the good ones are — just kidding. I basically, earlier this year, had wanted to look into pedestrian fatalities in Rhode Island. I had read something, I think in Axios’s Boston newsletter about how pedestrian fatalities were up in Massachusetts. And I was like, “Wow, that’s really interesting. I’m curious if maybe the same thing is happening in Rhode Island.” So I reached out to the Department of Transportation, also known as RIDOT, and I ended up having to file a public records request asking for a couple years of fatal pedestrian data. I wanted location, I wanted date, I wanted time. The most important thing that I was looking for was location. Because I was trying to figure out if there were certain places in Rhode Island where maybe this was happening more frequently, like a particularly dangerous intersection, or a place where maybe there isn’t a crosswalk that people are crossing anyway, something like that. And what I got back was date, time, gender …

Rob Smith 

But no location?

Colleen Cronin 

But no location. The thing that’s interesting is that this happened, and I was like, “That’s so weird that the data is not public.” I’m from Massachusetts, I know that it’s public in Massachusetts, Massachusetts has a whole dashboard that allows you to make these requests without even having to do public records requests. My dad’s a police officer, and I called him up and I was like, “Can you believe this?” I was really surprised. And Frank and Joe had brought up you might have suggested that I reach out …

Rob Smith 

It might have been on another podcast. I said, my favorite thing to do is to APRA the other APRA requests.

Colleen Cronin 

Exactly. So, I APRA-ed. First, I asked around and said “Does anybody already have this data, like advocates?” I talked to Providence Streets Coalition, Liza Burkin. And she said that yeah, actually, someone had requested the data and hadn’t been able to get it. But they got it from Providence police. I asked a couple of police departments based on Google searching the time and date, and I also had the age of the victims, trying to figure out where some of these crashes happened. A couple of police departments gave me reports that showed where the locations of these pedestrian fatalities were. I was going through all this trying to figure it out. Around the same time actually, Amy Russo at The Providence Journal came out with a really fabulous story talking to Providence Streets Coalition about their journey trying to request this data and the complaint that they filed with the attorney general trying to argue that this data should be public. So all this is happening in the background. And I’m like, alright, I’ll APRA the APRAs. Rob had talked about this before. And when we say APRAs that means …

Rob Smith 

It’s an “access to public records” request. APRA actually stands for Access to Public Records Act. It’s especially key if you’re a journalist, but I mean, any resident of the United States can do this or probably non-resident United States can do this. Any records or documents handled by state or local authorities are usually considered public, so you could ask for them. So that’s what an APRA request is. But before you go any further, Colleen, how many different instances did you get? Can you ballpark for us?

Colleen Cronin 

It was like more than a dozen crashes …

Rob Smith 

And what was the timeframe?

Colleen Cronin 

… last year. So I did from 2019 to whenever I made the request originally in the winter earlier this year, and crashes had gone down slightly, but ballpark I think there’s anywhere between like a dozen and a little more than 20 [per year] the last couple of years. And RIDOT has given that information out, like pure numbers of pedestrian crashes. The Providence Journal also wrote a story just covering the numbers not talking about where.

Rob Smith 

So you’re a reporter, you had an idea., Department of Transportation said no, we’re not going to give you that. So you’re out of your story. What did you do next?

Colleen Cronin 

So I filed a complaint as well with the attorney general, which I still haven’t heard back from but I decided that the argument that they were making was that this information should remain private, both because they say that the law allowed requires it …

Rob Smith 

There’s a certain number of exemptions when it comes to public records request that they can say, “We can’t because the law says we don’t have to for whatever.”

Colleen Cronin 

And they partly said that it was because that kind of information, the location information, could be used by a litigant to sue to say that the state had been maybe negligent about safety measures on a particularly dangerous intersection or road or whatever. They cited a Supreme Court case that sort of supported that idea. But I did say to myself, what maybe I’m trying to prove here is that it’s in the public interest for this information to be out there. I’d had a conversation with the state of Massachusetts highway safety program manager who runs IMPACT, which is the Massachusetts portal, her name is Bonnie Polin. And she’d said that they were getting so many requests every year. And I was like, that’s kind of wild. Like they’re getting a ton of requests. I’m sure Rhode Island is getting a lot of requests. So I APRA-ed the APRAs. It cost more than $200. It took a couple of weeks. And then it took me a couple of weeks to sift through the data because I got probably more than 200 documents back that I needed to go through. And they’re all PDFs, and my computer sounded like an airplane.

Rob Smith 

So you got your request back, you have over 200 documents to read, you read them. What did you find? And what did you write about in your story?

Colleen Cronin 

So the initial thing I found which was really my first goal in writing the story was how many people were asking for this information. And I found that 17 individuals or organizations, some multiple times had requested this data in some way, shape or form. Not all of them were asking for pedestrian deaths. Some of them were asking for regular car crashes, or maybe car crashes at a particular intersection. Someone actually who was doing a research paper for their master’s was asking for some data, crash data around roundabouts in, I think it was Warwick, which he was like super impressed by the roundabouts. He is from the south, and was like, “Oh, this is cool.”

Rob Smith 

The only person who thinks those roundabouts are cool. Everyone in Warwick hates them in Apponaugh.

Colleen Cronin 

What’s ironic about that request is to go back to my Massachusetts experience. When I was an intern at the Cape Cod Times, I wrote a story about kind of a controversial rotary that went into place in Orleans, on Cape Cod. And I talked to the police chief there. And he very readily gave me crash data for that location saying, Hey, before this, we put this rotary and there were a lot of crashes and they were severe crashes. After we put the rotary in yes, they were crashes, but they were no-injury crashes, they were a lot less serious. Anyway. So people were asking for kind of variety of information. There were academics asking for information. And I’m talking to a professor at the University of Toronto who was working with another professor in the United States. And they were gathering data to from every state to see how effective drivers’ technologies were and whether or not they kept people safe. So there’s a lot of people who are asking for this data, and they’re asking for it, because they would like to study it so that they can try to advocate for safety measures, increase safety measures, advocate for changes, or trying to prove that in the academic sense that, you know, certain mechanisms that you put on a road, or, you know, with cars make things safer or not safer.

Rob Smith 

So how does this relate to the environment?

Colleen Cronin 

So I think that’s actually an interesting question. And I think it reminds me also of how we talk about affordable housing, and how does that relate to the environment? Honestly, everything does relate to the environment. But in talking to Jamie from Providence Streets Coalition, he was talking about how driving is very unsafe. It is super dangerous. It’s a leading cause of death for young people. And, and I remember taking driver’s ed and my instructor saying if the amount of people who die every day in cars died on planes, in buses, nobody would take them, they would be grounded.

Rob Smith 

Oh yeah. Shut it down, shut it down.

Colleen Cronin 

Planes would not be flying. But we somehow have an acceptance of the number of fatalities that are happening in car accidents?

Rob Smith 

Would you say that DOD by sort of refusing to release this data is kind of masking just what the risks of driving are in Rhode Island?

Colleen Cronin 

I think that they would say no, because they do end up releasing sort of aggregate data. I think the director said when he was talking to ProJo about the pedestrian deaths, he said, and this makes a lot of sense, because there can be abnormalities when you look at really specific things. But if you look at data, like five-year spans of data that can help you see trends …

Rob Smith 

Sure, but they don’t have a dashboard like Massachusetts does.

Colleen Cronin 

They are giving us some data. They’re telling us numbers of people who are dying, they’re not necessarily… getting injured or whatever, they’ll release that but they won’t tell us where it’s happening. And so that is a crucial part of the story. Because in Massachusetts they actually use their own dashboard to implement like $40 million a year that they get to improve safety. So they’re using data to improve safety. And to get this back to the environment, I had originally been asking about pedestrian data because, you know, people won’t take public transportation if it’s not efficient and safe for them, people also aren’t gonna walk because it’s not efficient and safe for them. And so if there are neighborhoods or places where it’s unsafe to walk, people are going to choose to drive.

Rob Smith 

I mean, that is 100% what it does, because even if you live like I live in Warwick, we live in a “quiet suburban neighborhood,” but people drive insane and make it not safe to walk on my quiet back streets. So why are cars a problem? Why are cars an environmental story?

Colleen Cronin 

Environmentally speaking, advocates would say that it is better to move away from single-car use, because cars emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, CO2. So if you reduce emissions, it’s better for the environment, because it’s putting less greenhouse gases into the air. It’s also better for air quality for there to be fewer people driving. It’s both like a big E Environmental issue because cars emit greenhouse gases, which contribute to climate change. But it’s also a small environment issue, because in areas where there’s a lot of traffic, there’s more pollution in the air.

Rob Smith 

And noise pollution …

Colleen Cronin 

And noise pollution, and noise pollution and air pollution are really bad for people.

Rob Smith 

People think cities are noisy, but it’s cars. The problem is cars, the problem is always cars.

Colleen Cronin 

So I found out that a lot of people wanted this data, first of all, and then I also found out that RIDOT had previously thought about making the data public. I saw some emails between RIDOT staff and Liza Burkin, who is a lead organizer for Providence Streets Coalition. And she had gone to a Traffic Safety Commission meeting where they presented a prototype of the website or the dashboard that they were going to use that made the information public, people had given feedback. And then the dashboard went nowhere. Liza followed up with them repeatedly about it. At one point they offered that perhaps COVID had slowed them down a little bit. When I asked the Department of Transportation spokesperson directly about why the dashboard hadn’t happened, he didn’t respond to my question.

Rob Smith 

But they did give the data to someone who doesn’t work for the state, right?

Colleen Cronin 

In this request that I made, I got external requests for data. But I also got internal requests for data or sort of internal requests for data. RIDOT works with a lot of consulting firms on projects that they’re working on, like engineering consulting firms. So they’re outside groups working on RIDOT projects with RIDOT through state and federal funding. And so there’s a lot of communication and a lot of exchange on this crash data for these projects that the consultants are working on. And you can see in the emails that anytime they’re working on changing something or improving the safety of something, they’re constantly asking, well, what’s the crash data? What’s the crash data? What’s the crash data, so they’re using this information to improve roads and make them safer. Just bear with me with that. So they’re constantly exchanging this stuff with consultants. And I found in an email exchange that a consultant who had previously worked with RIDOT on a project for RIDOT asked for crash data information for a private project, and RIDOT gave that information to the consultant. So this was a consultant who had done RIDOT work, but this was not for a RIDOT project. I saw at least one instance of that, I saw another instance of the same consultant asking for crash data, and someone replying, oh, yeah, we can help you out with that. I didn’t see a receipt for data on that. So I don’t know if there was a second instance of this, I only went back to 2019 for my request. So I don’t know if this kind of thing happened before or after. But from what I gathered, in my information, this has happened in at least one instance. And then I also saw that a different consultant asked for data on a private project and was told that they needed to put forward a public records request. I asked the Department of Transportation if this was a policy to give out this data on private projects. All that I got from the RIDOT spokesperson on this was at this time, RIDOT will continue to maintain its longstanding policy to follow federal law of not releasing crash data, but using it for its intended purpose to have RIDOT and our consultants propose improvements that make roads safer.

Rob Smith 

So if they’re citing federal law, why can Massachusetts release it in a dashboard and why can’t Rhode Island?

Colleen Cronin 

That is a wonderful question which I will answer. So if you remember, Jamie Pahigian from Providence Streets Coalition filed a complaint with the Department of Transportation against the Department of Transportation for withholding the documents with the attorney general. Jamie sent me the response from the attorney general siding with RIDOT and that response says that basically RIDOT does have the discretion to pull that information, because APRA law, which is, as we mentioned earlier, the public records law for Rhode Island, it doesn’t discriminate, like who’s asking, and you don’t have to provide a reason for asking for information. So RIDOT’s argument is, we wouldn’t have to provide this information to a litigant. So we’re not going to provide it to you, or we’re not going to provide it to someone who could sue us, so we’re not going to provide it to you. So they can keep it private. But the attorney general’s office, in their response, also said that they would encourage RIDOT to consider making it public. So after I wrote my story, and I found that 17 people have asked for this information, and they thought about making it public before, and that they had also given the information to a consultant for a private project, I submitted my story and some documentation from my APRA request to the attorney general, as a rebuttal. So I’m still waiting to hear back and we’ll see what happens.

Rob Smith 

So what are you going to do next about car safety and this data? What’s next for you?

Colleen Cronin 

That is a great question. Well, I’m going to follow along and see if advocates move forward with any plans to try to argue for this data. When I hear back if I hear back from the attorney general, I’ll likely report on that. And I might just end up pursuing the maybe laborious angle of reaching out to the individual police departments to get the information.

Rob Smith 

Well, thanks for answering all my questions, Colleen. Thank you for switching seats with me and thanks to our listeners for following along. We want to thank Vanessa Carlton for letting us use her song “Willows” for our theme song which you hear at the beginning and end of every episode. We also want to thank Roger Williams University and Professor Bernardo Motta for letting us use the recording studio. Thanks also to Jo, who edits our podcasts, for editing and mixing the episode and fixing all Colleen’s editing mistakes.

Colleen Cronin 

There’s so many!

Rob Smith 

If you have any questions, tips or podcast ideas, please email Colleen at [email protected].

Colleen Cronin 

And if you have or would like to watch, read or listen to any more Rhody environmental news you can go to our website, ecoRInews.org

Rob Smith 

That’s not written here.

Colleen Cronin 

I know I just forgot.

Rob Smith 

And if you want to check out any more environmental stories about crash data or anything else related to the environment, please check out the rest of our work at ecoRI.org. That’s your laptop back …

Colleen Cronin 

Thanks, Rob!