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Background: Driver licensing and motor vehicle crash data are essential to advancing the field of young driver research and, more broadly, to promoting traffic safety. Without access to individual-level data, researchers are limited to ecological analyses, with all their attendant biases. Further, lack of access to identifiable data precludes linkage of these data to other valuable existing data sources and to track individual drivers over time. However, such data, which states compile and control, have become increasingly inaccessible over recent decades. Legal restrictions on the release of such data, including the 1994 federal Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA), were adopted primarily to prevent stalking. In the early 1990s a celebrity and abortion provider were both infamously murdered at home by individuals who found their address through motor vehicle licensing records. Neither the DPPA nor analogous state laws aimed to restrict access to data for researchers (Cosgrove, 2000). In fact, the DPPA explicitly authorizes state motor vehicle departments to release identifiable data “for producing statistical reports and other research, provided that personal information is not published.” But states seem to have interpreted the spirit and the language of DPPA broadly; some states have even created additional restrictions in state law. Only two previous studies have investigated access to driver licensing data from the appropriate state agencies—both for purposes other than traffic safety research. In the first, researchers surveyed the licensing agency in each US jurisdiction to assess the availability of individual-level licensing data for a hypothetical study that proposed contacting individuals for participation in breast cancer research (Walsh et al. 2011). Of the 42 states that responded, 16 allowed access to the data. The second team of researchers also contacted agencies directly to ask for individual-level data about every driver’s street address, sex, height and weight to determine body mass index for an obesity study (Littenberg & Lubetkin 2016). Researchers found that 14 states would provide data records with the requested information and four states would provide zip code and the other requested data but not full street address. Interestingly, Littenberg & Lubetkin were approved to receive driver’s license data from six states that were found to have restricted data by Walsh’s team. Also, Walsh gained approval from Utah which declined the request of Littenberg & Lubetkin. Notably, neither of these studies inquired about crash records and neither looked directly at a given state’s legal text. Purpose: The authors conducted the first legal mapping study that systematically measures the attributes of state laws regulating the release of driver licensing and motor vehicle crash data for scientific research in general. As a comparison, they also identified states’ laws regulating birth certificate and death certificate data, two other existing data sources that have been critical in the advancement of population health. Methods: Legal statutes pertaining to the release of data from each of the four data sources (driver licensing, crash, birth, death) were obtained by first searching law.justia.com--a US law website with an extensive collection of legislation from the 50 states and DC—for relevant terms. Terms for driver licensing records were as follows: ‘STATE NAME + driving records confidentiality’, ‘STATE NAME + driving records disclosure’, and ‘STATE NAME + driving records availability’. This procedure was repeated using the analogous search phrases for the other three sources. In cases where the search phrase did not prompt an immediate return of relevant legal text, the authors searched state government websites and looked through related documents (e.g., record request forms) to identify associated laws. They created a database in Microsoft Access to collate state-level legal text. A trained abstractor utilized the legal text to answer a set of questions from an a priori codebook generated by the project team; a proportion of states were double coded by a separate abstractor to ensure reliability. Data that were abstracted included: (1) accessibility to individual-level identifiable data and associated conditions/limitations; (2) accessibility to bulk-level identifiable data and conditions/limitations; and (3) fees associated with obtaining such records. The codebook questions were also separated by person type (e.g., researcher, government employee, general public) to determine if accessibility changed based on person-factors. Results: Data collection and analysis is in progress and is expected to be completed by December, 2017. Results will include the number and names of states that allow access to bulk individual-level license and crash data, any conditions or limitations to this access, whether or not a fee is associated with obtaining these records, and whether these answers change based on person type. Conclusions: Use of existing databases is critical to the advancement of scientific research. Specifically in young driver research, access to licensing and crash data—and via identifiable data, linkage to databases in other sectors such as health—would allow us to better monitor trends, examine causes and circumstances of crashes, and ultimately continue advancing knowledge in the field. Quantification of the extent to which US state agencies are permitted legally to share driver data with researchers will directly inform researchers’ work to advocate for increased sharing of these data with academic researchers.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANB30 Standing Committee on Operator Education and Regulation.

18-04904

English

3p

2018

Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

References

Access; Crash data; Data collection; Driver licenses; Driver licensing; Driver records; Drivers; Privacy; Records management; Research projects; Researchers; State laws; State motor vehicle departments

Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA)

Personal information

Data and Information Technology; Highways; Law; Research; Safety and Human Factors

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2018 Paper #18-04904

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 8 2018 11:13AM