Secure Data Commons

The Secure Data Commons (SDC) is a cloud-based analytics platform created and operated by the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) to break down data silos and accelerate innovation.

Traffic engineers, researchers, and data scientists are enabled to securely access transportation datasets - including those of moderate sensitivity (PII & CBI) - and associated metadata in a controlled, FedRAMP-authorized environment.

From statistical analysis to building and training neural networks, the SDC's modern, scalable ecosystem provides users on-demand access to powerful GPU-accelerated workstations and built-in tools to more rapidly and collaboratively turn sensitive data into meaningful insights for USDOT-approved projects.

Learn More About the SDC

SDC Capabilities

Secure Environment Access sensitive transportation datasets in a controlled, FedRAMP-aligned cloud workspace with the proper security controls for your program's data. The SDC ensures that sensitive information remains protected while still being accessible to authorized users.

Open-Source Collaboration Bring together researchers from academia and federal agencies to share common data sources and analytical tools. The SDC lowers the logistical barriers that typically slow down cross-organizational research partnerships.

Analytical Tools and Workstations Work in pre-configured cloud environments loaded with industry-standard analytical tools — including Anaconda3, ArcGIS Pro, DBeaver, GitLab, and Amazon Bedrock for generative AI modeling. SDC provides the underlying infrastructure so your team can focus on analysis and collaboration, with users both in and outside of the DOT, without sensitive data ever leaving the secure boundary.

For more information on Secure Data Commons, please see SDC Capabilities.pdf.

For more information on SDC's security capabilities, please see SDC Security.pdf.

Featured Datasets

The USDOT Secure Data Commons (SDC) platform features datasets for the following projects - check back soon as new projects (datasets) are added:

Waze for Cities Program

The U.S. Department of Transportation's (USDOT) Safety Data Initiative (SDI) is a cross-cutting, collaborative effort within DOT, led by the Office of the Secretary of Transportation. The intent of SDI is to build on and enhance safety efforts related to data, analysis, and policy making. SDI is integrating Waze data with transportation data to develop rapid crash indicators.

Highway Safety Information System (HSIS)

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) developed the Highway Safety Information System (HSIS) to support safety research programs and provides input for program policy decisions. HSIS is a roadway-based system that provides quality data on a large number of crash, roadway, and traffic variables. The crash, roadway inventory, and traffic volume data are acquired annually from a select group of States.

FHWA provides this data to researchers upon request through the HSIS webpage. Educators who wish to use HSIS data for instructional purposes in a road safety course should contact HSIS staff directly at charles.fay@dot.gov. For more information https://highways.dot.gov/research/safety/hsis

Project Spotlights

Project Spotlights highlight how federal agencies and research teams have used the Secure Data Commons to advance transportation research goals.

Connected Vehicle Pilot (CVP) Deployment Program

Graphic depicting a vehicle equipped with connected technologies

The USDOT Connected Vehicle Pilot Deployment Program combined connected vehicle technologies across three deployment sites — New York City (NYCDOT), Tampa (THEA), and Wyoming (WYDOT) — to improve traveler safety, mobility, and system efficiency. All three deployments provided post-processed data to the SDC, which supported independent evaluators conducting safety assessments of vehicle paths, driver alerts, forward collision warnings, and imminent collision warning data. Evaluators were able to work with data in multiple formats including KML files, CSV files, auto-generated reports, and data histograms within the SDC platform. Following the completion of the program, data covered by privacy agreements were retired per each site's Data Management Plan; scrubbed and de-identified data along with associated analytic tools remain available on the ITS Data Hub.

Sponsor: Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office (ITS JPO)

FRA Agile Railroad Data Science Programs (ARDS)

A graphic depicting a locomotive on a railroad track

The Federal Railroad Administration’s Agile Railroad Data Science (ARDS) program utilized the Secure Data Commons (SDC) to modernize safety research by establishing a centralized, cross-modal data hub. Through this partnership, the SDC hosted and provided seamless access to core FRA-owned datasets—including accident, incident, and Positive Train Control data—enabling researchers to analyze them alongside ingested external sources like 2020 Decennial Census data. By hosting these disparate datasets in a unified environment and further developing a dedicated service to export results into visualization tools, the SDC successfully reduced technical barriers, allowing analysts to focus on safety outcomes rather than data management.

Sponsor: Federal Railroad Administration

Added Highlights from the Waze Alerts User Community

ITS JPO users of the SDC platform leveraged the compiled Waze Alerts data to support transportation safety research, analyzing and monitoring data such as:

Adirondack Park road conditions s & daily trends during hiking days, informing options for new shuttle route planning.
Regional crashes for 31 parks in the Inter-Mountain Region, both supplementing NPS data or acting as the major source of crash trends.
Mount Rainier entrance congestion and how gateway communities and roadways areused to enter the park from visitor home (eg. Portland, Seattle,

Sponsor: Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office (ITS JPO)

COVID-19 Waze Traffic Alert Dashboard

In March 2020, the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center used the SDC to rapidly develop a COVID-19 Waze Traffic Alert Dashboard in response to the pandemic's impact on roadway activity. By leveraging existing crowdsourced Waze traffic incident data already available within the SDC, the team built and deployed a dashboard tracking relative changes in weekly traffic jam alerts across all U.S. metropolitan areas, providing near real-time visibility into how travel behavior was shifting nationwide. The dashboard offered state, metropolitan, and county-level time trend data, significantly increasing accessibility to mobility indicators for transportation agencies during a period of rapid change. The team continued providing weekly updates through 2022, with ongoing work aimed at enhancing the dashboard for broader use across the U.S. DOT.

Sponsor: Volpe Center

Waze Pilot: Safety Applications

Graphic depicting an automobile crashed into a streetlight post

This pilot project utilized the SDC to explore how crowdsourced Waze traffic alert data could be integrated with public data sources to improve crash prediction and support law enforcement resource allocation. Analytical methods were applied to test Waze alert data against a crash prediction model used by Tennessee Highway Patrol, with the goal of improving both the spatial and temporal resolution of crash risk estimates. The results were significant: using Waze data, the spatial resolution of crash estimates was refined from 42 square miles to 1 square mile, and the temporal resolution improved from 4-hour to 1-hour time windows — while also improving overall model accuracy. Related published research: Flynn et al., Transportation Research Record, 2022 and Flynn et al., DOT-VNTSC-BTS-19-01, 2018.

Sponsor: OST-P Safety Data Initiative

Open-Source Software for Intelligent Transportation Systems (OSS4ITS)

Graphic depicts OSS4ITS projects implementing collaborative agile software development

The OSS4ITS initiative was created to advance the deployment of interoperable transportation systems through open-source software development and shared Communities of Practice. Key projects within the ecosystem -- including the Secure Data Commons (SDC), CARMA, V2X Hub, and the Operation Data Environment (ODE) -- were collaboratively developed, each to support different components of an overall ITS deployment architecture, and aligned to the National ITS Reference Architecture. The ecosystem promoted development of opensource code, ensuring code reuse and shared architecture. The software suite also provided a common framework for planners and engineers to design and implement interoperable systems to support USDOT research teams, software companies and device manufacturers.

BTS Partnership: SDC Waze Data Analysis

Graphic of two hands clasped in a hand-shake

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) partnered with the Secure Data Commons to build proof-of-concept analytical tools examining the relationship between weather conditions and transportation system performance. Through the Emergency Planning Transportation Data Initiative — a partnership between BTS and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) — the SDC supported researchers integrating severe weather data with the national transportation system, enabling historical analysis, forecasting, and post-event evaluation useful for public safety and emergency evacuation preparedness at a multi-state scale. Building on prior Volpe research, BTS also used SDC Waze data to conduct a highway "Hot Spot" analysis, applying machine learning and cluster analysis to develop a proof-of-concept daily dashboard identifying congestion locations, bottleneck sites, and weather-related road closures across a subset of the national highway system.

Sponsor: Bureau of Transportation Statistics

SDC is Right for You If...

To find out if SDC is the right fit for your project, please consider the questions and reference table below.

Questions	Yes	No
Does your project generate data that needs to be access-controlled?	✅ SDC will store and analyze sensitive data with fine-grained access control. Access is authorized to users through a data use agreement with revocable access terms to protect the sensitivity of data.	Project-level data management may be secure enough.
Does your project require collaboration between DOT Analysts and Researchers in the transportation community using the same data and tools?	✅ SDC promotes team collaboration by enabling data analysis tools, custom toolsets, open code sharing, and dataset curation to data analysts and external data providers.	Data sharing and analysis for the project team, using the same tools may be sufficient.
Does the project generate or need to manage sensitive data?	✅ If the project manages only moderately sensitive data, then SDC is a good option. If data is not sensitive, the SDC is not required. Public data hubs may be a better option (like the ITS Data Hub).	The SDC may not a good option for managing extremely sensitive data.
Does your project need to combine data from a diverse set of transportation data sources?	✅ SDC leverages cloud capabilities to share complex transportation datasets with the transportation research community to analyze problems or gain insights.	SDC will enables scalable data storage, data analysis and user access via cloud-based platforms.

Getting Started With the SDC

Project Lifecycle & Next Steps

The SDC Project Lifecycle

Interconnected circular arrows representing a project lifecycle

Each project in the USDOT Secure Data Commons (SDC) goes through a standard lifecycle of activities.

Prospective

SDC team works with Project Owners who have a clear objective and a set of data providers and/or data analysts to support your research project needs.

Planned

We work with you to understand the objective, timelines, data provider and data analyst needs. The SDC and project teams collaborate to define the high-level requirements for the project and assess the suitability of the platform.

Discovery

We collaborate with you to define the detailed requirements for your project including gathering dataset documentation to demoing data pipeline architecture.

Onboarding

SDC Team implements data ingestion and curation requirements. We provide access to workstations, training materials, and assistance for queries and data uploads to support cross-project collaboration.

Active

Project team utilizes the SDC platform to achieve research objectives, while we actively provide Support Desk service.

Export

We work with you to conclude active research work in the SDC platform and begin planning retirement. (No new data coming from data providers.)

Retire

SDC Team archives project data as per records retention schedule, removes team members, and works with Project Owner to conduct final closeout.

What's Next?

As a project owner interested in joining the SDC, use the steps below to get started:

Reach Out to SDC Team. Contact SDC Support to get an introductory overview of the services and platform features that SDC provides. Email sdc-support@dot.gov .
Let's Meet! During the SDC 101 Overview meeting, come prepared to provide an overview of your research program objectives, goals, and any security concerns. You will gain an understanding of SDC's capabilities, dataset availability, and customer support services.
Way Forward. SDC team will provide a Cost Estimation to support your program needs and notional timelines. Steps to fund SDC supporting services will follow the Working Capital Fund process. SDC services are flexible to exercise options to provide dedicated capacity.

Support

The SDC support team works with approved project owners, data providers, and analysts to ensure your SDC environment runs smoothly.

SDC Support Desk

The SDC support team has also created the following user guides to further support the day-to-day activities of project researcher/analysts and data providers.