The Chicago Crash Browser Seeks To Map Street Safety
By Chuck Sudo in News on Mar 25, 2013 9:00PM
Steven Vance tirelessly works to make it better, easier and safer for bicyclists, pedestrians and public transit riders to get about Chicago. Whether it’s creating an offline bike map for smartphones, mapping bike accidents across Chicago or filming the aggressive tendencies of area motorists, Vance has become an authority on transit issues in Chicago.
One of Vance’s newer projects is the Chicago Crash Browser, which maps out traffic accidents involving a car crashing into a bicycle or pedestrian, using Illinois Department of Transportation data from 2005 through 2011. You can focus on an intersection on the map and search for the number of crashes there. For example, it should surprise no one that Wicker Park’s six corner intersection of North, Damen and Milwaukee Avenues is a fairly common crash site, as is the harrowing intersection around Milwaukee and Ogden.
Vance is submitting the Chicago Crash Browser to the Knight News Challenge in an attempt to further refine its development. He’s also shared the code on GitHub so that others may assist in bettering the application. As Vance writes on Streetsblog Chicago.
The underlying data set, provided by IDOT, has the potential to tell us more about street safety. For example, it would be useful to compare crash data in different wards to measure the effectiveness of infrastructure improvements paid for by aldermen’s “menu money” discretionary funds.The project needs more collaborators so it can tell more of these stories.
If the Knight Foundation decides to help fund the project, Vance writes he would migrate it to more powerful servers and hire developers so that the browser could map out the entire state.