Why Safety Analysis Still Lives in Spreadsheets (And What It Costs)

I’ve sat across from dozens of safety engineers at conferences over the past year. When I ask how they run network screening, the answer is almost always the same: Excel.

Not because they love spreadsheets. Not because Excel is the right tool for the job. But because for most agencies, there’s nothing in between a $200K enterprise platform and a workbook someone built five years ago. So they make do. They build elaborate formulas, hand-join crash tables, and spend months producing a priority list that could be generated in an afternoon.

This isn’t a criticism of the engineers. It’s an observation about an industry-wide gap that has persisted for over a decade.

How We Got Here

When AASHTO published the Highway Safety Manual in 2010, it gave agencies a rigorous, evidence-based framework for safety analysis: network screening, crash modification factors, Empirical Bayes methods, severity weighting. The methodology was a leap forward. The software ecosystem never fully followed.

AASHTO’s Safety Analyst was the first dedicated tool, built specifically for HSM workflows. It was retired around 2015, leaving a gap that the industry has struggled to fill ever since.

What replaced it? A handful of options, each with significant tradeoffs:

• Enterprise platforms — Products aligned with AASHTO or backed by large firms offer capable analysis but come with enterprise pricing and implementation timelines measured in months, sometimes over a year. They work for large state DOTs with dedicated IT budgets, but they’re out of reach for most mid-sized agencies, MPOs, and cities.
• Legacy tools — Some crash analysis software has been around for decades. These tools handle basic crash summaries and diagrams well, but they were designed for a pre-HSM world. They lack modern network screening workflows, severity-weighted analysis, and interactive mapping.
• Spreadsheets — And then there’s what everyone actually uses. Excel becomes the default not by choice, but by elimination. When the enterprise option is too expensive and the legacy option is too limited, engineers build their own workbooks.

The ingenuity is impressive. I’ve seen spreadsheets with hundreds of linked tabs that implement full EPDO calculations, crash rate rankings, and even rudimentary spatial joins. These aren’t lazy workarounds — they’re evidence of demand that the market hasn’t met.

What Spreadsheet-Based Analysis Actually Costs

The spreadsheet approach works — until it doesn’t. And the costs aren’t always obvious, because they accumulate slowly across an entire safety program.

There’s also an opportunity cost that’s harder to measure. When your analyst spends four months on screening, they’re not doing diagnosis. They’re not evaluating countermeasures. They’re not building the High-Injury Network map your director asked for. The spreadsheet doesn’t just slow down one task — it creates a bottleneck across the entire safety program.

What’s Changing

Three forces are converging that make the spreadsheet status quo unsustainable:

SS4A is forcing the issue. The Safe Streets for All program has awarded grants to over 2,000 communities, most of which are doing safety analysis for the first time. They don’t have a legacy spreadsheet to fall back on. They need tools that work out of the box.

Systemic analysis is nearly impossible in a spreadsheet. FHWA is pushing agencies toward systemic safety analysis — evaluating risk factors across an entire network rather than just looking at crash clusters. This requires spatial data, attribute-based screening, and statistical methods that spreadsheets were never designed for.

The talent gap is real. There aren’t enough safety engineers to serve the demand. When you can’t hire more analysts to do manual work, you need tools that let your existing team do more with less. A platform that turns a four-month screening into a four-day screening doesn’t just save time — it multiplies your team’s capacity.

What the Next Chapter Looks Like

The methodology exists. The Highway Safety Manual laid out the science over a decade ago. The data exists — every state maintains crash records, road inventories, and traffic counts. The funding exists — between SS4A, HSIP, and state safety programs, there’s more money dedicated to roadway safety than ever before.

The missing piece has been accessible software. Tools that implement HSM methods without requiring a six-figure contract or a six-month implementation. Tools that handle the math, the mapping, and the data management so that engineers can focus on what they do best: understanding their network and making it safer.

If your agency is still running network screening in spreadsheets, you’re not alone. Most agencies are. But the gap between what’s possible and what’s practical is closing fast — and the agencies that close it first will be the ones delivering results while others are still building formulas.