People killed or seriously injured (KSI) is used as the metric for roadway safety rather than simply fatalities because fatalities alone tend to be random in nature and can obscure long-term trends. Including serious injuries makes the data more robust and better highlights how the region is doing at preventing serious vehicle crashes. This approach has been promoted by the FHWA and embraced by both NJDOT and PennDOT. Because KSI can fluctuate from year to year, five-year rolling averages are used to identify trends, as seen in the first chart. The data separates pedestrians and bicyclists from motor vehicle occupants because these users are more vulnerable to death or serious injury when involved in a crash. Data for motor vehicle and combined bicyclist and pedestrian KSI can be looked at as a raw total, normalized based on population (per capita), or based on vehicle miles driven (per VMT).

Each year, transit agencies have to fulfill the Federal Transit Agency’s (FTA) TPM requirements by reporting data to the FTA’s National Transit Database (NTD) on passengers who are killed and injured (regardless of severity) on their services, employees who are injured at work, and safety events. Transit fatalities are defined as deaths confirmed within thirty days, excluding deaths from trespassing and suicide. SEPTA includes fatalities from trespassers and suicides in their TPM reporting and target setting, while New Jersey Transit and PATCO do not. To use consistent data for all three transit agencies, trespassing deaths and suicides are included in this analysis. Transit injuries are defined as harm to a person which requires immediate medical attention away from the scene. While crime-related injuries are reported to the NTD, they are excluded from the injury performance target. As with fatalities, these are included in the analysis for data consistency. The third table below shows employee injuries per 200,000 work hours, which is also a TPM requirement. Major safety events include collisions, derailments, fires, hazardous material spills, or evacuations. Major security events are excluded from this analysis, per federal guidance.