Highway engineers around the sprawling state of Texas want all the accident data they can get. With 800,000 crashes a year in the state, lives can be saved with a new left-turn lane here or a guard rail there, or perhaps a traffic light over a once-quiet rural intersection. Engineers need to analyze accident patterns to know where to spend limited highway-safety funds. But today, engineers in the Department of Trans-portation's 25 district offices can't get the data. To view accident records, they must go to Austin and pore through reels of microfilm in the state archives, trying to find reports relevant to particular stretches of highway. Even if they find what they're looking for, the information is at least three years out of date because of the backlog of accident reports awaiting microfilming.
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