You'd panic, too, if you had never seen nine-track tapes. I didn't let on to the clerk that I had no earthly idea how to get what I wanted from them. I had hired someone to take data from the tapes if necessary. It was necessary. I paid the Indiana state police about $150 for the tapes, which held three years of police reports for every traffic crash in the state, as well as my chance to do our first major computer-assisted reporting project.

The Shelbyville News already had dipped its toes into the CAR pool. We use spreadsheets to analyze government spending. We use the Internet daily. We built small databases for a feature on local inventors and to tabulate a survey about community parks.

But we had never tangled with a 500MB relational database. It was overwhelmingly scary at first, but the computer work turned out to be much easier than I ever dreamed.

Head-first plunge

So we dove into the CAR deep end and gave our readers something special. We delved into every aspect of traffic crashes in Shelby County, empowering readers with information they could use to influence public officials and take action themselves to make the streets safer.

We didn't stop with ranking roads where people crashed most. We used the database to identify where crashes happened, what caused them and how they happened. Reporters talked to countless cops, business owners, road engineers, planners, safety experts and drivers.

We didn't send politicians running. We didn't stun the public. We did what we always do. We took what we discovered and developed it into stories that showed readers what's happening, why it's happening and how problems can be fixed.

Accident prone

We showed the public how the city and state governments made no improvements as East State Road 44 - once a country road lined with corn fields and a drive-in theater developed over three decades into a busy business corridor. The database helped us show readers there were more accidents on three miles of that road than on any other road in Shelby County. Our reporting helped us find reasons and solutions.

City and state officials told us heavy traffic was to blame. Maybe so, but there was something else, according to police, business owners and drivers. Bad planning and a lack of communication between city and state agencies aggravated the problem, they said. Computer analysis and further reporting showed they were right.

Driveway dilemma

Police, business owners and drivers told us the biggest problem was drivers crossing several lanes of speeding traffic to get in and out of strip-center parking lots. The road is packed with driveways. The state handed out permits for driveways like bank tellers hand out lollipops. In fact, they let new businesses cut more and more driveways until there were places where six driveways sat within a few hundred feet of each other - despite state safety guidelines saying driveways should be at least 150 feet apart.

The database showed us most of the accidents were caused by cars slowing or stopped to turn into the lots or by cars turning onto the highway from them. Transportation department officials said statewide there was too little money to fix too many roads. The engineer responsible for approving driveway permits told us that Shelby County residents needed to improve their driving skills to adapt to changing traffic conditions.

The road affected everyone in our community. In this small Hoosier city, this was a huge story. To buy groceries, grab a fast-food lunch or go shopping, readers must drive that road. They knew there was a problem. They had theories about what was wrong. Still, most were calling for cliché solutions like more traffic lights, lower speed limits or a center turn lane.

Driver education

We could have written those things, but the database gave us a chance to show other reasons behind the problem. After reading our report, residents and public officials alike agreed the issue was planning - or lack of it.

Change of plans

Now city zoning officials are talking about access roads and asking about the impact of new developments on traffic. They are redesigning one intersection before a developer builds a new shopping center and housing addition there. They are pressing the state for input in planning and driveway permits.

Whether the reports will affect state planning is unclear. The state's cooperation with the city on redesigning the one intersection could be a sign of progress. One transportation department official has said the district office pinned our stories on a bulletin board. We haven't found out yet whether they're learning from it or tossing darts at it.

The stories about East State Road 44 anchored the series, but they were just two of a dozen. In other reports, we showed readers how Indiana law allowed teen-agers to get driver's licenses with little behind-the-wheel experience and how teen-agers crashed much more often than any other age group. In addition, we showed how drivers of all ages were their own worst enemies on the road. Three-fourths of all crashes were caused by the fault of a driver, including half because at least one of the drivers was not paying attention.

Small paper, big project

Readers loved it. The series was comprehensive, insightful, sophisticated and fun. In newspaper terms, it was good journalism. Now, we're ready to do more of it.

We learned a great deal from this project. We learned and hopefully showed others that even the smallest newspapers can do big CAR projects. We learned how to do CAR right. Our next projects will be faster and better because of the experience.

We learned what everyone doing CAR at whatever level - should remember: don't be afraid to ask for help when it's needed. IRE members offered guidance and warnings when I wrote them. Richard Mullins and the NICAR staff taught me how to clean the database at an intermediate boot camp. A data recovery company helped me move the state police data from nine-track tapes onto a CD-ROM, then turn a flat file with seven different types of records into seven comma-delimited files so I could import the tables into Microsoft Access.

Because we asked for help, we were able to overcome what could have been project-ending (and CAR-ending) obstacles for our small newsroom. Instead, we've given the paper's leaders a taste of what CAR can mean for reporting, and now we'll get more time for CAR projects.

While I did the database work, everyone in our newsroom helped. That is critical for small papers. Two of us did the bulk of the reporting, but every reporter conducted interviews for the stories. Our editors, graphic artist and photographer put together a terrific graphic presentation so writers could leave some numbers out of stories while still giving readers gobs of stats. Copy editors ravaged the early drafts until we got it right. And our publisher laid the groundwork by investing in CAR training for me and CAR resources for our newsroom.

Our next major projects (already in the works) will be more ambitious and hard-hitting.