When Brice Kuimi shares the focus of his work, he is often met with one question: "Road safety and public health - what's the connection?"
An assistant professor and epidemiologist at the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Kuimi studies the impact of vehicle collisions on our individual health and the broader health-care system.
He likens the issue to infectious diseases, noting that vehicle collisions can have serious mental, physical and social health consequences for individuals while placing a burden on already overburdened health resources. In Ontario alone, health issues caused by motor vehicles cost the province more than $728 million in 2019 .
"There is this mismatch between how I see the problem and how people were talking about it," he says, adding that from his perspective, the term traffic 'accident' is inaccurate because "in reality, most of them are preventable."
That's why some municipalities - from Kamloops, B.C. to Toronto and Halifax - have adopted strategies over the past 15 years to eliminate traffic-related injuries and fatalities. Kuimi says this approach, known as Vision Zero, shifts the focus from changing individual behaviour to looking at ways to design roads and policies that account for human error, "because people will always make mistakes."
He cites bike lanes and speed bumps as examples of interventions that can, in theory, reduce collisions. Kuimi and his team plan to evaluate the effectiveness of these measures using artificial intelligence to analyze data from before and after their implementation.
Kuimi explains this approach using a cooking analogy: If you want to know whether spice makes food better, you need to compare the taste of the food with and without it. That's what this project is doing with collisions, he says, by finding data on when and where they occur to determine what factors make a difference.
As a recipient of an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario government, Kuimi aims to develop a machine learning model that can be used to fill missing data gaps to make our roads safer. He also hopes to inspire more public health professionals to explore this field.
"If through this project and funding I could create some interest in people to consider public health approaches to road safety as a career option, that would be great."
