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US Road Fatalities 2001-09 mapped with OpenStreetMap
- tibbon 15y agoSeems driving in Barrow Alaska is much safer than I thought! I wish I could switch on and off things. I want to see motorcycles only.
- jamesbressi 15y agoVery well done. It would be interesting to have the ability to click on one of the reports and get details--something I'm sure you would have done if it was available or possible.
- tomkinstinch 15y agoToggling each type on/off might be interesting as well. I was immediately curious if there is a cluster of bicyclist fatalities anywhere. I clicked on the icons in the key expecting to change the visibility of each category, but that did nothing.
- PLejeck 15y agoI too was disappointed by that oversight.
- s00pcan 15y agoThis is not very interesting without any ability to add a filter.
- PLejeck 15y agoThis has just reaffirmed my fear of east-coasters.
- colanderman 15y agoMore so east-coast roads. It seems to me like the west coast has more traffic-calming devices (though my experience there is limited to two weeks of bicycling in Seattle and Portland). Our idea of "traffic calming" on the east coast is to add strobe lights to traffic signals.
- PLejeck 15y agoI dunno, east-coasters seem to have more road rage too. When you get to New York, people are completely and utterly pissed at eachother. Every time I go to Chicago, I notice that drivers all seem to have this underlying urge to kill all pedestrians which we don't get in California.
- syncopatience 15y agoI spent a weekend in Chicago and saw more pedestrians in near-death situations than in the rest of my life, cumulative. Where on Earth does that come from?
- popdensity 15y agoYou probably said this in jest, but if you look at a map of US population density, it is nearly identical.
- PLejeck 15y agoWell, it was mostly in jest, yes, but I think it's more than just that, I think it's also that here on the west coast we tend to drive a lot better than people in New York ;)
- sukuriant 15y agoUnless there's a drop of rain on the road, then all bets are off and everyone drives 80 miles an hour less than the speed limit.
- PLejeck 15y agoYeah, especially in 25MPH zones, then they just go in reverse!
- shawnc 15y agoSomething I've noticed in Canada - is each province despises the drivers of the province to their east. So BC complains about Alberta, Alberta about Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan about Manitoba... and so on. Seems the same thing happens west to east down there too.
- ImprovedSilence 15y agoI was never such a violent hateful douchebag as I was when living in DC (nova) and driving everywhere. It's something in the roads I'm telling you.
- laconian 15y agoFound my friend that died in 2002, though it only reported his death and not his fiancee's as well. What a sad nitpick! :(
- PLejeck 15y agoMaybe the fiancee's icon is placed under their icon?
- fennecfoxen 15y agoI saw some bicycle icons barely visible peeking around from behind car icons at certain intersections. No way to see the bike icon. Weak UI design.
- tobiasSoftware 15y agoI think a per-person version of this chart would be interesting as well, dividing the map into regions, counting the number of accidents, and dividing it by the number of people in the region. Placement of accidents is less interesting than chance you will have an accident if you live there IMO. Still cool though :)
- PLejeck 15y agoEast coast: death, west coast: not so death
- mahyarm 15y agoMost population graphs of the USA look like this in general.
- nostromo 15y agoWhere there are more people, there are more accidents. It'd be interesting to see it corrected for population.
- pvarangot 15y agoExactly, and the safest place to go drive your car through is the Grand Canyon.
- PLejeck 15y agoAbsolutely, especially in the river.
- eande 15y agoGreat chart and SF downtown has a denser deep blue color; always suspected that is a more risky place for pedestrian.
- nostromo 15y agoIf you think SF is bad, look at Manhattan. What's with all the 99 year old deaths in NYC? Bad data?
- PLejeck 15y agoI dunno, Manhattan is sloooooooow-moving, I'm not sure how you can fatally injure somebody at 5MPH gridlock!
- smallblacksun 15y agoA car can kill a pedestrian/bicyclist/motorcyclist at surprisingly low speeds. It's almost impossible to kill someone in a car at under 25 MPH or so (unless they drive off a cliff or something), but pedestrians can be killed by cars going as slowly as 10 MPH (they get knocked off their feet and hit their heads, usually). I read a very interesting paper by the NTSB or IIHS about that, but can't find it now.
- warfangle 15y agoYou've never seen third/second avenue with a green light at 14th street. Traffic rockets through there, except during rush hour.
- dripton 15y agoPedestrian and bicycle fatalities outnumber car occupant fatalities in Manhattan for this reason. I saw a billboard last time I drove through NYC, explaining why the speed limit is 35 rather than 45. It basically said that if a car hits a pedestrian going 35, the pedestrian will probably live, but if a car hits a pedestrian going 45, the pedestrian will probably die.
- PLejeck 15y ago
- Florin_Andrei 15y agoFar more fatalities in the CA Central Valley than in the SF Bay Area, even though the respective population densities are the other way round.
- PLejeck 15y agoI can tell you, having lived my whole life in Modesto, the drivers here are IDIOTS. I once saw a car that careened off a perfectly straight road, 90 degrees, over the sidewalk and into a fence.
- AmericanOP 15y agoNot quite sure yet how this influences my recent urge to start riding motorcycles. There seems to be a (near) 1:2 ratio between motorcycle and vehicle fatalities. I already knew motorcycle riders were 5 times more likely to get in accidents, and those accidents were 35 times more likely to result in very serious injury. In my life so far I've been in one small fender bender. This does confirm some of the self-imposed safety rules I'm planning. No car commercial road joyriding. Lots of yellow in the hills. Highway driving seems to be relatively safe, which is comforting. Extreme caution at intersections (look at the bay bridge on-ramp). No riding at night.
- mootothemax 15y agoThis does confirm some of the self-imposed safety rules I'm planning. If you live near a major city, try spending a couple of weeks cycling around it first. You'll learn to spot danger warning signs at much less dangerous speeds :)
- ImprovedSilence 15y agoI ride a motorcycle. They say if you're a lifetime rider, odds are you are going to get in one major crash in your lifetime. Both my uncles, several neighbors, and my grandfather have been in wrecks (none lethal, thank god), but everyone of them knows someone who died in a motorcycle accident it seems. I dumped my bike once, nothing serious, but I'm still overly cautious while riding. My big suggestion is to act as if every car is either going to break the law (run stop signs) or not see you, so you've always got to be on the defense. Other comments on the map, it's kinda odd feeling, finding the places of people you knew who died in a car crash, and seeing them as a statistic.
- sliverstorm 15y agoWell, at least one. As for cars breaking the law- don't act like they are about to, but don't trust them. Don't be surprised when they DO screw up, and have a plan.
- lutorm 15y agoBeing a rider before I left the Bay Area, it's kind of spooky to look at Highway 9, 84 to La Honda, and Summit road. You can literally see the yellows in the corners, and looking at the map, I can see many of those corners in my mind's eye. That said, if you spend some time around Hwy 9 on a summer weekend, it shouldn't surprise you that the accident rate is high. If you don't ride like those people, your risk will not mimic the statistics.
- vcadambe 15y agoHere is a similar map of UK - http://map.itoworld.com/ http://map.itoworld.com/.
- freejoe76 15y agoThis is an interesting dataset -- too bad it's such a boring map. Two ways it could be improved: 1. Allow filtering by year, by type of death. 2. Allow data to be compared (deaths by state, by type, by year) in a non-map based form. I'm sure there are more...
- ImprovedSilence 15y agoAllow bringing icons on the bottom up to the top, there is too much overlap on multiple fatality accidents.
- jberryman 15y agosome sort of heatmap where number of deaths are normalized with respect to vehicle density (or I guess just population). That would give an idea of which states/regions/roads are more treacherous or have more dangerous drivers.
- dromidas 15y agoVehicle density is itself a cause of increased accidents. If you normalized by it you would lose accuracy. To make it more clear, 10 cars on the same road would increase the chance of an accident non-linearly. It would be more than 10x more likely to have an accident occur there simply because there is more chaos.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- nhebb 15y ago... plus, move the legends off to the side.
- benvanderbeek 15y agoI was involved in an accident where I caused a fatality in 1999 (guy sleeping in my lane on a rural highway at 3am), so it's not on here. Otherwise I would be able to say something about its accuracy and completeness.
- tsumnia 15y agoVery awkward to see the number of deaths that I drive past daily... Even more awkward to think I could have been a statistic on this site a few years ago! The searching functionality could use some work. I was unable to input the actual address of my accident and had to guess-timate. Like others said, filtering would be highly appreciated as well.
- teflonhook 15y agoHoly fuck, humans should not be allowed to drive. Bring on google.
- teflonhook 15y agoHoly fuck, humans should not be allowed to drive. Bring on google.
- hesdeadjim 15y agoI would love to see this map annotated with fatalities involving blood alcohol content > 0.08. Not sure if that information is made available though...
- danso 15y agoThere's a link to the NHTSA pick-a-checkbox data finder, but here's the link to the FTP site for the raw data: ftp://ftp.nhtsa.dot.gov/fars/ Maps like these are visually interesting, but I think a stats analysis of the many characteristics the data include, such as previous DUI offenses and weather conditions, could be even more fascinating.
- xbryanx 15y agoI really wish maps like these would display their data on cartograms related to population - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram. The open west always makes my eye come up with false conclusions at first glance.
- tmcw 15y agoCartograms plus zoomable web maps tend to be fail city. And, on top of that, cartograms tend to be rather unreadable. For the critique, http://www.cartogrammar.com/blog/i-hate-your-favorite-election-map/ http://www.cartogrammar.com/blog/i-hate-your-favorite-electi... That said, it's always useful to have data be relative to population rather than absolute, if it is a relative number. I don't think that's valid in this case, because these aren't accidents 'of the population' - they're accidents of people traveling on roads, which is entirely different. If the coloring were relative to traffic density or throughput, that'd be better.
- steauengeglase 15y agoInteresting, looks like the previous owner neglected to tell me that someone was killed in my driveway back in '07.
- dmvaldman 15y agoFor a benchmark for comparison, the design firm Fathom made a map consisting of only the roads of the US and no other geographical features. It's also an awesome poster I have up in my room. It's interesting to overlay these two maps with each other. http://fathom.info/allstreets/ http://fathom.info/allstreets/
- Groxx 15y agoThat is an awesome poster. Thanks for the link!
- tux1968 15y agoThe age of pedestrians killed in accidents was surprising to me. Of course I didn't do an exhaustive scan, but everywhere I looked they were much older than I imagined they'd be. Many seniors.
- spec 15y agoSomething very similar has been done years ago: http://www.city-data.com/accidents/acc-Chicago-Illinois.html http://www.city-data.com/accidents/acc-Chicago-Illinois.html. Per-city mapping using Google Maps with additional info and Google street map when clicking on each marker.
- wavephorm 15y agoI am never driving again.
- ry0ohki 15y agoI'd love to see a similar map of airplane fatalities for those that are scared of flying for a reassuring comparison...
- RobSpectre 15y agoA lot of loved ones on this map.
- JshWright 15y agoI find this a little... disquieting... I know the story behind a dozen or so of these little icons. Like any traumatic event, they'll come to mind from time to time (some are more memorable than others, for some reason). Being reminded of all of them at once is actually a little overwhelming. It's also a bit of a disconnect seeing the chaos and trauma of some of those scenes reduced to a tiny graphic.
- vishaldpatel 15y agoIt seems that walking is more dangerous than driving in San Francisco.
- forgottenpaswrd 15y agoI saw the death of a motorist. We were on the mountains, he was at more than 120mph in the straight part of the road(he passed over us), and as he took a curve super fast, a van appeared on the other side of the road. Instant dead, looking at him was the most horrible vision in my life. His friends(also riders) will came later and cry. It is strange, three people I knew from my college died on a very small motorcycle with a very small curb on the road(two young girls and one boy, no helmet). I could not believe it, it made no sense for three people to die on such a small danger(I have seen MBT riders so much times do things x10000 more dangerous). Four young men and women from my village also died as they return from a Spanish fiesta on the night. In the North of Spain and Portugal non official "rallies" are the first cause of dead on young people. What is strange is that until looking at this map, I strangely believed those accidents were "special", but it seems there are not.
- motters 15y agoIs there anything like this for the UK?
- jake_weston 15y agoYes, exactly like this: http://map.itoworld.com/road-casualties-uk http://map.itoworld.com/road-casualties-uk