Office of Traffic Safety (OTS)

Each year California’s OTS publishes crash rankings for all counties and cities. The OTS Rankings were developed so that individual cities could compare their city’s traffic safety statistics to those of other cities with similar-sized populations. Cities could use these comparisons to see what areas they may have problems in and which they were doing well in. The results helped both cities and OTS identify emerging or on-going traffic safety problem areas in order to help plan how to combat the problems and help with the possibility of facilitating grants. It should be noted that OTS rankings are only indicators of potential problems; there are many factors that may either understate or overstate a city/county ranking that must be evaluated based on local circumstances.