Data-Driven Hospitality: How Proactive Mobility Data is Supporting Safety in Napa Valley Tourism

The Napa Valley is world-renowned for its wineries, vineyards and stunning mountain terrain popular with recreational cyclists—but the same attractions that draw in 3.7 million tourists per year may present hidden dangers. Between 2015 and 2021, the Napa Valley Vision Zero Plan reported 4,908 roadway injury collisions, including 571 severe or fatal crashes. High tourist volumes and visitors’ unfamiliarity with local roads can contribute to unsafe driving behaviors and elevated road risks across the county.

The Napa Valley Transportation Authority (NVTA) is committed to enhancing the county’s roadways, cycling corridors, and pedestrian environment—and safety is its key priority. The county’s ultimate goal is Vision Zero: a strategy to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries, while ensuring efficient transportation options for all.

To get better insights around community-led strategies for keeping both tourists and residents safe, the Napa Valley Transportation Authority (NVTA) turned to Michelin Mobility Intelligence to supplement its historical traffic safety data with telematics data.

“We wanted to take a deeper look into the challenges we know exist from our current data sources, such as DUI issues and speeding,” says Diana Meehan, NVTA’s Planning and Programming Manager. “Most of the data we traditionally have access to only provides information after a crash has occurred. We wanted to take a more proactive approach, which is exactly what this telematics data provided for us.”

The Unique Infrastructure Challenges of a Wine & Tourism Economy

While tourism is the engine of the Napa Valley economy, visiting drivers can create roadway safety challenges for local drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. Driving under the influence (DUI) and tourists’ unfamiliarity with the region’s mountainous geography can contribute to crashes.

“We found specific instances at all times of day and night where speeding was incredibly egregious—in excess of 100 mph,” says Meehan. “Because it’s a rural, scenic county with mountainous curvy roads, people sometimes bring luxury cars up here just to test them out since there isn’t much traffic on the more rural roadways.”

Napa Valley is also a major draw for local and recreational cyclists, who admire the region’s stunning views while cycling along narrow rural roads and higher-speed arterials that they must share with freight and tourist vehicles. Elevated speed can also present hazards to cyclist safety.

NVTA sought to strengthen its data with new insights that would help decision-makers and regional partners understand and evaluate safety improvements and enhanced law enforcement in this heavily visited tourism destination. To support that effort, NVTA partnered with MMI.

Shifting from Reactive to Proactive Data Insights

California’s state reporting system relies on post-crash data that can lag by up to two years, and may lack context around why a crash occurred. Additionally, the system only tracks reported crashes—it doesn’t include unreported incidents or other risk indicators that may occur before a crash is reported.

By turning to Michelin Mobility Intelligence, NVTA was able to tap into anonymized, aggregated data around real-world driving behavior leveraged from over 40,000 global apps. From this data, they could gain a better understanding around day-to-day driving behaviors throughout the county, helping it identify localized hot spots where risk indicators (harsh braking, harsh acceleration, speeding) routinely occur, even in the absence of crash reporting.

The data analysis helped NVTA gain insight into day-to-day driving patterns, measure year-over-year changes in driving behaviors, and identify potentially hazardous areas based on a combination of risk factors, including the presence of vulnerable road users (VRUs). The data helped NVTA to identify areas for further evaluation such as the scenic Silverado Trail, a 26-mile arterial where some vehicles clocked speeds of over 100 mph, and Highway 29, an area where data indicated instances of hard braking, including in areas of pedestrian crossings.

Future Impact: Safety Improvements and Regional Collaborations

Michelin’s insights provided NVTA and other local organizations with powerful data resources to support more robust law enforcement planning and safety measures.

“Our local bike coalition uses [the insights] to push for reduced school speed limits,” says Meehan. “We also bring this data to our Vision Zero Working Group and the Safe Routes to School Advisory Committee meetings. When we address a known area of issue, like the Culinary Institute of America (where students cross a state-owned highway), we can use this data to communicate why we want to make specific improvements.”

Their data-backed risk assessment is a powerful tool in helping prioritize safety improvements and law enforcement resources., NVTA is also incorporating the findings into its grant applications, as supporting material for additional funding for community safety initiatives and advancing Napa County’s Vision Zero goal of eliminating traffic fatalities.

Learn more about how MMI partnered with NVTA in our case study.

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