I mapped almost every USA traffic death in the 21st century
roadway.report
roadway.report
How many Americans think chocolate milk comes from brown cows? I’d wager almost every single person who answers in the affirmative really just thinks it’s the funnier answer.
I wish those people pushing this, were doing it just for the lulz. But mostly they are serious.
LLMs are very good at mixing information to produce bullshit.
Others believe it, or at least continue to believe, because they find a community and connection with other believers.
Now try to use data that flawed to make assumptions over a lifespan about human health. About the only studies I truly believe are the ones where people are at a facility and all food is provided to them and tracked.
We were allowed out - I had a full time job, but couldn't eat or drink any food not provided by the center (we took a radio-isotope tracer with food, and had to collect our poop). It was quite interesting :_)
I find that most of the dismissal around FFQs is pretty vague and seems to come from a group of people who find the consensus in nutrition research inconvenient for them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Slate_Star_Code...
The margins of error on online opt-in polls are massive.
At least in the Indiana, the quality of this data... varies widely. Coordinates don't always match reality, the street names can't always be geocoded, sometimes the timestamps don't even parse as valid dates.
I talked to a city staffer here whose job largely involves cleaning up this data. But not in a permanent sense. They are using the aggregate data handed down from the state, and they are cleaning a local copy. Then next year or next month, they get more data and have to re-merge or re-do their fixes because their fixes aren't upstream, and have originated from another jurisdiction.
The whole system needs improvement!
Additional errors are potentially produced from my own processing of the federal data, but those will be rooted out over time. Project being OS will hopefully help with that.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/file-downloads?p=nhtsa/downloads/FARS/
In fact, the author of the website "I mapped almost every.." might want to add references to the data sources for credibility and less of a "spam" look. How about an About page.
The splash photos on that website says it all.
So we're slowly forgetting that FTP and HTTPS aren't the same thing.
Good data is needed as a few accident causes do tend to be common in certain road/location conditions and those can be fixed. For example while the total number of accidents on train crossing is low (15~20 fatalities per year) in Austria, all of them are the driver's fault and almost all (except for massive idiot drivers) can be fixed by installing automatic gates on all crossings.
It's apparently not a no-brainer here -- two of the lethal accidents I've witnessed [one involving ripping the door off a car with the help of some kind stangers, to get someone out of a literally flaming wreck] would have been entirely avoided by a simple traffic circle. The most grizzly one I remember could likely (it seems to me; I'm not a traffic...engineer?) have been avoided by not having a low-traffic on-ramp connect directly to a major highway, when there was a clearly-denoted on-ramp a quarter-mile away. Seeing another human with their head 20ft away leaves a bit of an impression on a child.
It's the same kind of logic that has most train tracks not put behind fences. In populated areas where lots of people roam around, putting a fence up next to the track helps keep people off the track. But in most of the country, the population is too sparse and people being on the track too infrequent for anybody to rationally prioritize putting fence up alongside all the track. Half a billion dollars worth of fence to save maybe a few dozen lives just isn't going to fly when there are schools to fund, old lead water mains to replace, bridges to repair, NASA probes to Uranus, etc etc.
I don't know what the exact figure is but there's a number where below that improvements won't be made.
It sounds bad but at the end of the day resources aren't unlimited - $1 spent on road safety improvements is $1 that can't go healthcare, law enforcement, schools, military etc.
At some point spending millions of dollars to probably save one life isn't worth it
The value of life in the United States
The following estimates have been applied to the value of life. The estimates are either for one year of additional life or for the statistical value of a single life.
- $50,000 per year of quality life (the "dialysis standard",[38] which had been a de facto international standard most private and government-run health insurance plans worldwide use to determine whether to cover a new medical procedure)[39]
- $129,000 per year of quality life (an update to the "dialysis standard")[40][39]
- $7.5 million (Federal Emergency Management Agency, Jul. 2020)[5]
- $9.1 million (Environmental Protection Agency, 2010)[41]
- $9.2 million (Department of Transportation, 2014)[42]
- $9.6 million (Department of Transportation, Aug. 2016)[43]
- $12.5 million (Department of Transportation, 2022)[44]
“This conventional terminology has often provoked misunderstanding on the part of both the public and decision-makers. What is involved is not the valuation of life as such, but the valuation of reductions in risks.”
https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2021-03/D...
Additionally, these numbers do not represent the threshold for whether a given proposal for roads is undertaken. They are used to inform the process, along with other relevant factors. That ‘Guidance’ like just above is interesting reading, they take time to point out that neither the economic data nor the risk data is perfect. (Perhaps that was obvious, but it’s good to know they recognize that fact officially in their analyses.)
The VSL for 2023 is 13.2 million, and one might assume based on the recent trend that it’s probably around ~$14M for this year. It’s good for our personal safety the higher their VSL estimate goes, but as parent noted, bad for our taxpayer pocketbooks, so we try to balance those forces. I know government processes can look bureaucratic and strange from the outside, and seem like a big machine we don’t control, but ultimately we do decide as a society how much we’re willing to pay to keep ourselves safe; public sentiment and tax/anti-tax pressures do have a massive influence in what gets done.
https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-...
The price is far far less than whatever the price of a human life is. The reason they are not implemented is not cost, but because people here consider it their god-given right to drive as quickly and aggressively as they want.
As an amendment to this: People in many western countries tend to do this.
Writing from Germany with, e.g., speed limits on some high ways being a broken promise from the last election.
For example, saying that a particular individual's life is worthless is very different from saying they have no dependents.
One could argue all those people are insane, but there are a lot of them.
Sometimes it's the impatient person who is tired of waiting as the signal has been going for minutes and there's no other evidence of a train.
Sometimes it's the inattentive person following the car in front.
Gates help the third person most. I haven't seen many crossings without gates, but they're a lot easier to miss than a gate.
Protecting people from a train collision has benefits for the train system as well. A collision causes confusion and delay and may damage the rolling stock or even the rails and could cause injuries and the operators likely need PTO. So it's rational to reduce collisions regardless of opinions about the choices of the participants.
They are also not entirely safe because people are idiots and get stuck without understanding that they can actually push through the barrier.
Ones with nothing except signs to stop, look and listen. You're most likely to find this while hiking, as a footpath crossing.
Flashing lights and beeps.
Half barriers, which only cover half the road (one lane in each direction). These are my automatic. Drivers can't get trapped.
Full barriers. These all have CCTV, and the train won't get a "green" until the signaller has seen both barriers close, and that no one is in the middle. These are used in cities and other busy places.
We also still have some full barrier crossings operated by a signalman near me. There's something pleasing about that.
Most of the barriers I see in the US are one sided - they don't let you drive on to the tracks, but there's no barrier that prevents you from leaving.
I guess it goes to show that stupid finds a way.
Yes, some people are that dumb.
It’s hard to explain to people they can only ever be in a single accident in which they’re not wearing their seatbelt.
Mostly they proclaim it’s fine, because they’re never in any accidents, and they drive safe anyway.
There's tools like therapy, CISM, CBT, humor, and the support of your buddies. Too often there's drink, pills, and suicide. It's not a particularly widespread detail, but suicide is the largest killer of firefighters by a large margin. I think that is a symptom of putting too much work and pressure on too few people.
I have found CBT, exercise, fasting, and daily yoga help keep stress and depression at bay for me.
I also am lucky to be a volunteer, so I can afford to skip as many calls as I want after an upsetting call. The career folks I know have it much much worse, because they might be on a horrible call but if they want to get paid they have to keep working. They might have an entire 24hr shift with several troubling calls back to back.
I used to think all fire and ambulance should be paid career. However, there's an important side effect of a larger group of volunteers sharing the burden. If you see too much to handle, you can take off all the time you need to recover. You aren't trapped by the job into witnessing more than you can handle. My wife recently was on an ambulance call that troubled her. She has taken a few weeks off from ambulance to decompress.
That being said, volunteerism is seriously struggling in America. If you live in the 70% of America that is served by volunteers, it is likely your local is extremely understaffed. Too many companies only have a small handful of firefighters who still show up, and those heroes aren't "taking time off" to recover, because if they do, the engine doesn't move. Too much of the country is overly reliant on volunteers but isn't showing up to be a volunteer to share the load. It's a socialist program, but there aren't enough people showing up to share the work, so it's collapsing.
And just paying folks to do this full time comes with very real increased tax burden and acute trauma on those individuals. Paying career staff isn't cheap.
If you live in an area that is served by volunteers, please seriously consider volunteering yourself. A lot of people on this site are young and physically able to volunteer. Tech folks are often well situated to volunteer, as we are more likely to be financially stable, have flexibility to dip for a call if it's urgent, often work remote, and sometimes would really benefit from getting out in the sunshine and meeting folks. Also it's so rewarding to do something so real after a big day of mental labor.
In the volunteer service you don't ever have to do something if you don't feel comfortable with it. If you show up to a call and you don't want to go inside the building you don't have to. Plenty of work is needed outside of a structure fire. If the call comes and you're too tired or busy, no big deal. I only make ~20% of my local calls, and that is high for my company. I've said "no way" to my officer before, and he reconsidered or found someone else.
You also don't have to be in "perfect shape". I thought they were going to be making me do crazy fitness tests to join like in the movies. Then I realized, we are so desperate for help we'll take anyone if your doctor will sign a form saying you're fit for duty. We've got members who are 200lb overweight, members who weigh 100lb, need glasses, some are 14, and some members who are over 70. Some can't wear an air pack so they do fire ground support work outside. Kids under 18 and folks who haven't yet gone to fire school aren't legally allowed inside a structure fire anyway. If you want to show up and put on gear, we've got work for you. There's so much work, it's so hard, and so few show up that anyone who does is a help.
It can be extremely rewarding to be a first responder in a small town. We only have 4k residents in my local, and I like getting to meet them and help them.
After just a few years I can't go to the grocery store without waving to half a dozen people. My calendar is filling up with invites to backyard BBQs, music jam sessions, a pie baking competition club, DnD games, a computer club, and a lifting club, all discovered through just meeting cool local folks. Between volunteering and regularly visiting our local busy coffeeshop at peak "sit around and chat" times, I'm feeling connected to a community in a way I thought only happens in movies and TV.
Definitely reach out to me if you ever want to talk about it. I'll happily answer any questions you have. I will say I'm kicking myself for not joining sooner. For eight years I was next to an amazing firehouse and never knew!
EMT, Paramedic, trainer of both.... my understanding is that CISM has been largely discredited. Maybe its a misapplication, a "lock you all in a room until everyone has talked/cried about it", but still.
Thankfully, in the PNW, many many departments have contracts with therapists. Some near me even have mental health professionals as full time employees.
The other, perhaps bigger reality for me is this:
It's not the trauma calls that get to you - in the end we're all just blood and tissue. It's the emotional calls. The CSA calls. SIDS. Elder neglect.
While it seems obvious, is this not similar to the ratio for all people in the age group that are firefighters (roughly 20-50 ish)?
Most people 40 years of age do not suddenly drop dead, so they’re much more likely to die by suicide.
That strategy was less effective for calls where the patient was declared dead on scene, and so no treatment was possible. I still remember each of those calls. Fortunately, I was never traumatized by them, in a PTSD sense. Rather, I learned the lesson of realizing how easily I, or one of my loved ones, can simply disappear one day; so I learned to make sure they all know that I love them, and to not take their presence in my life for granted.
The claim that only 1 out of 5 deaths is even recorded on this map is sobering.
I was nearly killed by a driver who disregarded the law and the police officer intentionally disabled his bodycam when interviewing a key witness, never questioned me, let the driver off with no tickets for his violations, and submitted a report with factual inaccuracies. Crooked cops don't have an interest in reporting the truth.
Of course, the victim is most likely being transported away in an ambulance or even dead, so they got little say. And the offender can paint the story with their picture: "the sun was low and blinding", "the cyclist came in at high speed" (probably a third of the car..), etc.
So that's what the report will say.
Should they presume malice, and discount any reference to circumstance? What if the circumstances were actually causal (which one would hope so, otherwise there are far more murderous sociopaths than anyone would have guessed) how should we parse the difference, and how will we identify potential hazards?
Presumably, from the cyclist’s perspective, the story will almost always go like this: “I was riding my bicycle in the correct fashion, in the appropriate lane, equipped with proper safety equipment, and then BAM! They came out of nowhere,” because if they had an opportunity to see the oncoming vehicle, judge whether it’s being operated safely, see where the driver’s attention is focused, and evaluate whether the driver’s awareness has or has not been compromised by the prevailing conditions—one would hope they could have avoided the crash in that space of time.
But reporters use such sympathetic language describing the negligent driver.
It works the other way. Cyclists think all drivers are maniacs for similar reasons.
How is this surprising at all?
I think we should assume that stupidity is evenly distributed and mode of transport doesn't affect it much, just the results.
If you analyze patterns in wheel angle and rate of change of angle over time, I would suspect that drvers who are texting/'looking down a screen' are going to have very distinct series of 'abrupt' correction patterns.
Where that telemetry is available in cars post 2010's then it should absolutely be used in forensics.
Some records, like those involving child abuse, don’t show on their calls for service website at all, so that’s an entire group of data that we the public just don’t get to know about.
Government data is notorious for being dirty and inaccurate.
It's ironic that drivers get frustrated by smaller, narrower streets as not feeling very safe, but that uncomfortable feeling 1) slows people down and 2) keeps them on their toes in terms of looking out for hazards rather than feeling ok with driving fast and not paying as much attention.
An example you may have seen in more rural areas is a straight road with an unnecessary curve before a stop sign or before entering a town. This forces you to slow down in a way that a speed limit doesn't.
https://globaldesigningcities.org/publication/global-street-...
Slow, local streets are relatively safe because of the slow speeds and the priority on building places that cater to people and businesses rather than moving automobiles as quickly as possible.
The 'in between' things, "stroads" are what tend to be the worst of both worlds. They do often include some token bike/pedestrian infrastructure that is not very safe, and they include lots of places where other cars exit/enter the road and turn lanes and just a lot of potential for bad interactions in unexpected ways.
The Strong Towns folks do a pretty good job of outlining this, and in terms of fixing it, I've seen some interesting stuff related to street design in the Netherlands.
Motorists will generally prefer whatever route gets them to their destination faster, but shops want to be where the traffic is, because they want motorists to stop and patronize them. So the shops want to set up right next to the high volume traffic path. But then pedestrians patronizing the same shops will be adjacent to that high speed high volume vehicle traffic.
In theory there are designs that can address this, i.e. you interleave roads so that each block is bounded by a high speed road for vehicle traffic on one side and a low speed road for pedestrians and cyclists on the other, keeping them separate but still allowing businesses to be accessible to both. But now you run into politics: The motorists may now have to walk up to a city block to get where they're going and the anti-car people are going to object to there being high speed roads and parking lots in the city whatsoever. Meanwhile making the change requires a budget allocation to do the work, so in the absence of consensus the status quo prevails.
Even banning pedestrians, we'd be far better off with fewer ingress points to fast roads that now need fewer lanes, and then the few intersections/roundabouts give access to side roads that are rated far, far slower, and have access to those store parking lots. The traffic that is going far is then detached from the one that is going close, the road gets faster, and the street is safer from fender benders. The diminished places where people stop fast and go will also lower stress on the physical road itself, leading to less places needing repairs very often, as the typical stroad turning lane does.
The sin of the stroad is to give us a 6 lane road that is ultimately risky and slow-ish due to those ingress points, instead of separating the fast traffic and the slow one. Most of the time we'd not even need a larger right of way: Just treating major roads as places where every intersection is a serious hazard to minimize.
The main issue here is really that other countries allow mixed-use zoning, causing a higher proportion of patrons to be pedestrians instead of the majority of the population living isolated in the suburbs and arriving by car. But you can't fix that by changing the roads, first you have to change the zoning -- and then wait several years for its effects to be realized.
And in the meantime the shops will want to be on the high traffic road because that's how most of their customers arrive.
Citation needed? Motorists (as opposed to pedestrians) rarely stop at a shop because they passed in front of it (except on very long routes). Reason being, it is pretty hard to register what shops you're passing when driving
I don't think having a lot of motor traffic in front of it helps a shop
The problem with those devices is that they slow down traffic even when there are no pedestrians around and the streets could be used to reduce congestion on the roads.
I wonder what effect slowing traffic down to a crawl has on overall emissions. I'm guessing not good. I bet speeders are overall more efficient than crawlers.
For everything else, have you ever thought about the effects of higher speed traffic on residents? I'm guessing you haven't cause "screw those people".
I returned recently, and the atmosphere is completely different, because now the streets have been extended. Through traffic completely changed the dynamics.
That’s what my home city did – Ljubljana. Over the past few decades the downtown area has become an almost square mile sized pedestrian zone. It has been wonderful. The area is completely revitalized, shops are booming, tourism is booming, entertainment industry is booming, everything is booming.
All because they kicked out the cars.
Here’s a video and a photo from my recent trip back. It made me realize how dead San Francisco feels in comparison even with 3x the population because everything is just roads with nowhere for people to hang.
https://x.com/Swizec/status/1803873334066843733 https://x.com/Swizec/status/1803896813679972570
The safest road is one without motor vehicles. Pedestrians and bicycles cause a tiny number of injuries even when traffic is high.
(numbers made up to emphasize a point, a neighborhood street with 1 death per year is pretty obviously unsafe)
The challenge in giving powerful entities direct control over our actions is they:
directly control our actions,
ceaselessly seek to control other actions,
will be as unaccountable as they can be,
will not ever allow control to flow in the other direction.
People just run out of shits to give at some point, and do what is easy.
It's really macro-economic and social inertia. Those sedentary folks have also convinced themselves they LIKE IT, and there is room (and real economic incentives) in the US trending in those directions. Like low property prices in the 'burbs, cheap gas (by global and economic standards), etc.
I disagree. The economy depends on the rivers of money that flow through the roads. Roads dispense communication, goods, labor, et al, over the vast area that is the USA. 40k deaths, distributed across the US, is a good deal.
On the other hand, I had great expectations for companies that wanted to provide a solution that's safer for a profit (robocars). A handful of people died during the development, and it's rejected outright by large portions of the population. So here we are.
Of course I was being mildly hyperbolic when saying we could solve speeding with technological enforcement, but I genuinely believe it could make a massive difference and lead to a significant quality of life improvement for most people. For those with the need for speed, build more tracks. But we should stop normalizing reckless behavior on our shared roadways. There should be an expectation of safety and we should maximize traffic flux while minimizing traffic injuries and fatalities.
Changing behaviour with a penalty isn't terribly effective unless enforced in such a way that it is incredibly privacy-invasive, more effective is changing the layout of the streets. But I wouldn't be sure that that is easier to fix on the pedestrian side than on the vehicle side.
You cannot eliminate risk, stop people from taking risks or stop people from dying. You say callous and I say practical. We all make tradeoffs every day, which has elevated society from subsistence existence. eg Every person doing physical labor, every doctor pushing diseases to be more resilient.
Will you step up when it’s your turn?
I’ve seen a number of cities find the authority or political will to increase the number of automated speed cameras. This suggests (while not a complete complete solution) a real step in the right direction
Once that's done the changes can roll out whenever there's maintenance or road widening going on. This is for example what Florida is doing to push for a comprehensive passenger rail system and it's what other countries have done to make their roads and streets safer and more efficient as well. So it'd stand to reason the same principle would work at state and local levels in the US for this as well.
The only real argument against it I could see is that it'll take too long but 30-50 years really is nothing for widespread infrastructure improvements.
Much like how putting a sign that says "pull" on a door that's designed to be pushed is analogous to what most places in NA do, which is to threaten people who use the road in the way it's designed.
In my experience the outsized political power is across gegraphic areas and instead is divided between classes, with the rich having almost all political power. A rich neighborhood in San Francisco hold much more political power than an improvised suburb in Fresno.
Instead the reason I believe for pedestrian traffic being considered the "cost of doing business" among the political classes, is the good old hatred of the poor. Pedastrian casualties are extremely rare among the rich, as the rich usually drive almost everywhere, and if they walk, they do so in an area which they have lobbied to make safe for pedestrians. The rich don’t care if the poor die.
†: As an immigrant, this feels like a major democratic oversight, one of many USA should fix if it wants to consider it self a democracy by 21st century standards.
BTW, in at least some states there are intermediate subdivisions of government, e.g. townships and districts, which take care of the roads even in rural areas.
Yes. This is what most—all?—other democracies do. More realistically though, municipality level governments include surrounding rural areas. In areas with small towns and large areas of rural farmlands, the farmers and town residents have equal representation, but the farmers obviously have a bigger political influence (hopefully the municipality governments have enough representatives though that the townfolks have at least a couple of representatives).
In reality unincorporated America also includes heavily urbanized areas (more often than not poorer than the surrounding areas). Here in Seattle this includes Skyway and White Center. But even if aside from those it is pretty unacceptable that all local planning for the community of e.g. Fairwood, or even Hobart don’t have any say in their municipality level organization, instead relying on the same county council as Seattle for their local affairs (a council with only 9 representatives for a total of 2.2 million constituents).
Counties are also generally all too happy to delegate decision making to communities which will take it on even if they don’t incorporate.
It is simply not acceptable to leave any part of your population without municipality level representation. Delegating this to a community council is not democratic and is extremely ripe for misuse. If a community wishes to remain unincorporated you have to look at why that is, and offer accommodations or change the incorporation strategy accordingly.
For example both Skyway and White Center (unincorporated King County, WA) voters have refuse to be incorporated with Renton and Burien respectively, but it was the Seattle city council (not voters) that rejected incorporating White Center, and voters have never been asked if they want their own independence. At the same time Vashon hasn’t even been asked.
If America was serious about democracy they would establish a policy in which every populated area outside of reservations will have local level representation in like 30 years (ideally they should have started that policy 30 years ago). And if there is no agreement on how a single community (say White Center) hasn’t incorporated by that time, have a plurality wins—or better yet, ranked choice—vote on e.g. 3 options, Seattle, Burien, or independent.
But that has nothing to do with rural areas. My brother lives in Iowa near medium town. Everything else is small towns, less than 1000. Should those incorporate and spend money on city services? What about the farmers who are spread out? What municipality do they belong to? The county is the best option.
2) exclusively sell cars with ludicrous acceleration and top speed
3) set legal speed limit at 1/6th the top speed of most vehicles
4) enforce strict financial penalties for operating one’s obligatory high-powered vehicle at more than 1/6th its maximum speed.
I’m strongly anti-car - I think we fucked up a whole lot designing society the way we did, but at this point, actual strict enforcement of speed limits with financial penalties is just robbery. If you want fewer people to die in car accidents, build a world that doesn’t obligate everyone to drive, or build a world where the vehicles for sale aren’t all SUVs with 0-60 times that would embarrass a Ferrari from 40 years ago, but don’t just start fining people when they use the vehicle you made them buy to do the thing it was made to do.
Think about the policy changes and thousands or more of political wranglings across every populous jurisdiction in the United States.
Even if we get it done over the next 20 to 120 years, what are we going do in the meanwhile?
Like, use data. If marketers and TikTok can trick us so easily using these techniques we can do the same in socio-technical settings too.
Like most things, “architectural” systems solutions will work better than point behavioural interventions, but it’s always going to be a mix.
Bike safety in The Netherlands was a multigenerational effort ranging from creating standards around roads intersections, bike paths and pavements and slowly remediating old ones while building new ones.
That’s only a tiny part of a society-wide effort to improve quality- and length-of-life measures, but like the US Interstate highway system, has had measurable results in terms of economic and social outcomes.
Some actions taken today will have individual results tomorrow. Some in 30 years. Better get started, right?
> 4) enforce strict financial penalties for operating one’s obligatory high-powered vehicle at more than 1/6th its maximum speed.
Most consumer cars are going to have a hard time at 120mph, if their tires are even rated for it.
So then you're claiming that most speed limits are 20mph.
Which they're not.
And then, I'm not sure? Should it be legal to drive suburban streets at triple digit speeds?
I am not sure what you're trying to get at, beyond "we should be able to use our cars to the limit of their capability, even if it exceeds our own as a driver".
Take the 85th percentile rule.
If you take a neighborhood road and change it from 40mph to 25mph in an attempt to "save the children", you can easily make it more dangerous.
The 85th percentile rule figures how fast people go on a road, and sets an appropriate speed limit that people naturally follow. Attempting to set a speed limit too low or too high leads to a wide speed variance, which makes the road more dangerous.
And where roads need to be fast and move a lot of cars, separate them out from other uses.
see fig 4 on speed variance:
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/17098/...
going faster or slower than average traffic speed shows markedly greater accident rate.
note that this can apply not only to speed limits, but things like express lanes going different speeds than other lanes
You are correct that people driving too fast make the road dangerous, but so does people driving too slow. Generally, from a safety point of view, you want the slowest speed at which almost everyone will actually drive at, as large variance in speed between drivers is dangerous. I think this is what the parent post was getting at: a speed limit too fast OR too slow will increase the number of accidents, keeping in mind that there will always be at least some drivers speeding.
It's accurate to say that people driving too fast are extra dangerous when there are slower vehicles in the road. The danger is still caused by the people driving too fast, not by those driving slowly, though. Speed kills.
Last time I was in Edmonton, known for extremely car centric design, wide roads, ample highways, etc. I was shocked by how much slower people drove, and as a result, how much safer driving was in general.
You only have to get slapped with a fine a few times before you start learning to control your speed.
PS plants are expensive, they need very regular maintenance.
Any solution needs to be wide spread.
We already know it's hopeless to teach them so what is left are traffic calming measures, heavy handed enforcement and technology (automatic speed limiters in cars).
Setting speed limits to speed people choose is a terrible idea.
The point of the Solomon curve is specifically that that isn't true.
This proves it doesn't work unless you only care about safety of people in cars (which Salomon curve seems to based on meaning it's meaningless for road design with the exception of highways).
I agree that merely lowering speeds without changing the design speed is a bad move, though.
Cars are very safe today and are getting much safer. Even basic cars come with many features to avoid accidents now. We will probably see deaths per mile driven go down on its own, without the need for malicious road design.
For their occupants, sure. For those outside cars (and remember, children can't drive) not so much: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/americas-cars-trucks-ar...
Also - this article is focused on data from 2016 to 2020 for front collisions. It mentions 744 deaths of children in front collisions on non public roads (where the blind spots it talks about matter more) in that 5 year period, which is frankly a small number. This is a country with a few hundred million people after all. Some number of deaths are inevitable and it isn’t a crisis.
Yet pedestrian deaths in the US have kept climbing over the past ten years or so.
I can tell you that as a lifelong pedestrian I do not feel remotely safe walking in North America compared to Western Europe, where I used to live, or Japan, which I've visited a few times.
Pedestrian deaths may have climbed in recent years because of increased smartphone use or changing behaviors. I see many more jaywalkers for example, especially by homeless drug addicts in west coast cities, many of whom just blindly step into traffic.
There is no rigorous way to attribute your claimed increase in pedestrian deaths to cars.
Walking in my neighborhood is objectively more dangerous than it needs to be. In the past decade there have been several instances where motorists have mowed down and killed pedestrians, sometimes when they were minding their own business walking on the sidewalk.
I'm sick of motorists only valuing their own convenience and using demeaning language to describe the pedestrians that they victimize.
Cars are getting less safe for pedestrians and cyclists, not more safe. Why should pedestrians bear the human cost of higher car speeds when drivers are the ones benefitting from it? Easy to pretend the benefits of speeding outweigh the costs when the benefits accrue to you and the costs accrue to other people.
I’ve seen streets go from 45mph to 25mph, lose driving lanes to bike or bus lanes, lose parking, etc. It makes things far worse than you think. What used to be a 20 minute drive will now be 35 minutes. Now consider the drive in both directions, time to find parking, and other trips you might make that day. It forces people to stay confined and not make as many trips because it simply isn’t possible to fit them in anymore. That is a loss of life quality.
> Why should pedestrians bear the human cost of higher car speeds when drivers are the ones benefitting from it?
They don’t have to and by and large they don’t bear any cost for it. You’re exaggerating things - the probability of a pedestrian dying is incredibly low. I walk as well and am not in fear of cars just like I’m not in fear of other unlikely events.
Many of the people who insist that there is no safety impact from high speed local roads nevertheless choose to raise their kids in suburban cul-de-sacs with minimal traffic and curvy roads with low speed limits. They want the right to subject other communities to speeding cars for their own convenience while protecting their own families from them.
Think about all the injuries too. All the environmental damage. All the people that don't hang on the street because of the fumes and noise and danger. All the road rage and cortisol that boils within otherwise sane people the moment you put them behind a wheel and into some traffic. All the sedentarism and obesity from people opting to drive 2 minutes rather than walk 10. All the forgone housing for parking stadiums.
I am all for convenience, but the costs are noticeable in more ways than one.
It's a bit like we've installed public-funded, unremovable alcohol spigots in everyone's home. People using them within their designed limits lead to awful outcomes. We're reasonably upset about that and respond with thousands of marginally and unequally enforced restrictions. Unhappy with their ineffectiveness, we just keep piling on more punitive restrictions.
Giving up booze infrastructure isn't on the table tho. We're too dependent on it.
Environmental damage is the argument against traffic calming measures. Vehicles are most efficient traveling at a consistent, relatively high speed. The reason the national speed limit was historically set at 55MPH was that was the approximate speed at which aerodynamic losses overcome mechanical losses from low gearing at low speeds, i.e. it was the speed that vehicles of the time were most fuel efficient. Modern vehicles have even better aerodynamics. Moreover, fuel efficiency for electric vehicles is essentially moot, because they have built-in storage that can be charged from intermittent renewable sources during times of oversupply when the power is "free".
Conversely, traffic calming generally results in vehicle speed changes as motorists slow down and then speed back up again in response to obstructions or areas with intentionally low visibility, which not only wastes fuel by operating vehicles below their optimal speed, it results in braking and acceleration that increases brake dust and tire wear.
Environmentally, the optimal road is flat and straight with no traffic control devices or other reasons for vehicles to change speed, i.e. a highway.
But then why is there even a road there? How to reduce the amount of travel required and how to most efficiently get from A to B are two different issues. Doing the former is good, but it requires things like new higher density housing construction, which takes a long time and is not going to cause most of the existing homes in the suburbs to cease to exist under any plausible expectation.
One of the reasons for this is that high density doesn't require much land; if you build 20 units to a lot then you could double the existing suburban housing stock as high density units, but you'd have only bulldozed 5% of them to do it, so the other 95% would still exist. This would reduce housing costs but you'd still have someone living in most of those existing homes, which are in places it's not viable to walk or use mass transit.
And then you might want to ask a question like "how do we make transportation more efficient in the short term, i.e. on a 5-10 year timescale"? To which the answer is things like "make new cars electric" and "optimize high-traffic roads to maximize the efficiency of existing vehicles".
A bus that starts and stops as it goes through traffic calming with 100 people on it will make an absolute joke of the efficiency of even the most fuel efficient of cars.
In areas where transit is given its own lane, or is a train, the time efficiency is much better as well. Plus if you give buses their own lanes you can remove traffic calming measures for them and give them signal priority, thus making them even more efficient from a resource, and time perspective.
Which is true in many cases, and would take decades of construction to do anything about, e.g. because people would have to move out of the suburbs or else at least one end of the trip will require a car, which would require massive long-term new housing construction in urban areas and has no short-term solution.
> A bus that starts and stops as it goes through traffic calming with 100 people on it will make an absolute joke of the efficiency of even the most fuel efficient of cars.
A city bus will get around 5MPG. The most efficient cars get more than 50MPG, so a city bus isn't even as fuel efficient as the cars until it's carrying more than 10 passengers. In theory they can carry 30-40 passengers, but generally in practice they don't, and in theory that 50+MPG car can carry five or more passengers too.
> In areas where transit is given its own lane, or is a train, the time efficiency is much better as well.
"In areas where the time efficiency of car traffic is purposely degraded, car traffic has lower time efficiency" is kind of tautological, but that's a silly argument for doing it, especially when the proposed alternative isn't available, e.g. because one of the endpoints is in the suburbs and the bus doesn't go there.
> Plus if you give buses their own lanes you can remove traffic calming measures for them and give them signal priority, thus making them even more efficient from a resource, and time perspective.
It's kind of odd that the same people who talk about wasted space from parking want to allocate entire bus lanes worth of space for a vehicle that only uses them 0.2% of the time. Also, what are you proposing here? 50+MPH buses traveling next to bike lanes and pedestrians? It would have to be even higher than that, because the bus is constantly starting and stopping to pick up passengers (and is then stationary for several seconds), so to achieve an average speed of e.g. 30MPH, its cruising speed would have to be above 60MPH, which is not only dangerous if adjacent to pedestrians, it's extremely inefficient as you're repeatedly accelerating a huge bus to highway speeds and then back again.
When the alternative is a car traveling a constant 60MPH on a highway, the bus compares unfavorably in terms of both time and fuel efficiency.
I will say that I lived in Vancouver. A city where I have never seen fewer than 10 people on a bus, where driving is frequently slower than transit, where you are rarely more than a 10 minute walk from a bus, where during rush hour, they convert parking lanes to bus lanes. It does take time to change, but it will take longer if we wait.
All of this works fine in places where they have been enacting all the things that you are saying don’t work. Most people just can’t imagine it working until they see it.
Presumably during rush hour, which is kind of the issue. You can get more people on the bus during peak hours, but then it's off-peak and you're in a place where you don't have a car. Now you're either waiting an hour for a bus so it can be full (which is slower than a car) or you're maintaining frequent service by running mostly-empty buses (which is less efficient than a car).
Vancouver is also a coastal city the size of Boston with a fairly high population density. Things will work there that won't work in smaller inland cities surrounded by suburban and rural areas.
> where driving is frequently slower than transit
But because driving there is slower than it is in most US cities, right? That's not really an attractive way to get the result. The goal is to make the new thing better, not to make the existing thing worse.
> All of this works fine in places where they have been enacting all the things that you are saying don’t work. Most people just can’t imagine it working until they see it.
The real problem is that people propose these things in places where they don't work. If you have an urban city with dense urban housing, obviously people will be able to use mass transit. But you can't just add a bus lane to a city where most of the population commutes in from the suburbs and expect it to have the same effect. Everyone still has to drive and all you've done is remove a travel lane and make the traffic worse.
At the end of the day, the more you design a neighborhood to facilitate driving, the more car traffic it will suffer. And the more convenient you make it to any other form of transportation, the less car traffic there will be.
Meanwhile people keep proposing things like bus lanes as something we should do in the present day, in places where they can't work until after that construction has already happened. Also, bus lanes are never a good idea because the density required to justify a bus lane (which is very high because it consumes a significant amount of surface land in an area with high land scarcity) is higher than the density required to justify a subway line (which doesn't).
For several decades, North American suburbanites have been living comfortably in their quiet bubble of car-dependent neighborhoods, completely disregarding the noise, danger and other externalities that their traffic imposes onto the people who choose sustainable transportation options in more densely-populated urban areas. It's time that we design our urban neighborhoods around the daily needs of the people actually living there rather than the speed and convenience of visitors.
It takes 30 years to completely reshape the housing market because there just aren't enough construction companies, and existing homes don't go on the market, to do it faster than that. It doesn't take 30 years to build a subway line, or if it does then your government is dysfunctional and you should focus on fixing that.
Meanwhile if you try to build the transit infrastructure before there is any demand for it, nobody uses it and you lose public support for even maintaining it because it turns into a money pit with high costs and low usage. And you get punished by the voters because the thing you put in place can't be used while the housing situation is still what it is, whereas the thing they have to use is now worse because the bus lane carrying empty buses nobody can practically use is consuming a travel lane that used to carry more cars.
> Nobody is suggesting to put a bus lane in a boring cul-de-sac, either.
The problem is that nobody is suggesting to put a bus in a boring cul-de-sac, because that would be highly inefficient and not have enough ridership to justify it. But then the people who live there can't take the bus because there isn't one, so they also can't use a bus lane when they get to the main road, and become angry with you when the disused bus lane makes the traffic worse.
> It's time that we design our urban neighborhoods around the daily needs of the people actually living there rather than the speed and convenience of visitors.
It's generally worth considering how those "visitors" will respond to that in terms of where they set up shop and how they vote.
> Vehicles are most efficient traveling at a consistent, relatively high speed.
Guess what, that's changing with EVs. Hybrid or not.
> Environmentally, the optimal road is flat and straight with no traffic control devices or other reasons for vehicles to change speed, i.e. a highway.
Awesome, put those where nowhere lives.
I didn't have to guess because I looked it up. Turns out it's much more proportional to acceleration/deceleration than absolute speed.
> Guess what, that's changing with EVs. Hybrid or not.
But EVs can charge from renewable sources and then they don't have any fuel-related emissions.
> Awesome, put those where nowhere lives.
Roads are used for going from where people live to where they want to go.
That was my point. Maybe the paragraph order was confusing.
> Roads are used for going from where people live to where they want to go.
They (or stroads, or highways) shouldn't be used in place of streets. A city should have the minimal set of roads to get the job done, everything else should be traffic calmed streets.
I am guessing you don’t know yourself which is why you’re posing questions as an argument.
> Guess what, that's changing with EVs. Hybrid or not.
It’s not changing. Consistency of speed is important no matter what. Regenerative braking is imperfect.
2. Yes, it is changing, LOL. And this is not about breaks. I was talking about power consumption. EV power consumption, unlike ICEs, is linear. So EV are obviously more power efficient at lower speeds. Besides the particulate generation aspect outlined before.
Every road I know, no matter how wide, is slow. And making it wider doesn't help because of induced demand.
There's also the geometry problem. As more roads are built and more people travel by car, the various amenities get spread further apart (e.g. more parking required) which then makes them more difficult for people to walk/cycle to. This then gets more people to make a car journey when they previously might have walked which increases the amount of traffic. As more traffic builds up, more and wider roads are built which pushes everything further apart. This then encourages more and longer car journeys which results in more congestion - the solution to which would appear to be adding just one more lane to the roads.
The trick to solving congestion issues is to encourage as many people as possible to make short, non-car based journeys. Unfortunately, prioritising car journeys is almost always at the expense of other traffic.
I remember when I was a kid, they took Pershing Road on the Stickney-Berwyn (Illinois) border and changed the commercial parking from diagonal to parallel and increased the traffic flow from two lanes to four. I have no firm data, but I’m pretty sure that this increased accidents on the street as well as effectively killed the Stickney CBD on Pershing Road (I would guess at least a third of the storefronts are currently vacant and that’s ignoring buildings that were demolished and never replaced). And I’m not entirely sure what traffic benefit came out of increasing the flow along the street as it’s not really a good connector of anything in that stretch.
I dare you to say “stroad” outside of your online echo chamber.
This is sort of like saying “most child p*rn is transported by undersea fiber optic cables!”
A road where traffic moves at 30mph can be poorly designed and lead to lots of accidents, but so long as those accidents are not a vehicle hitting a pedestrian they're unlikely to be fatal.
A road where traffic moves at 70mph is another story.
Europe as a whole has 7.4 with 746.4 million people, and developed EU countries are around or under 5. Surface area is actually quite similar 9.3 million vs 10 million km2.
There are countries with population densities higher and lower than US in there, and ALL BUT ONE OF THEM have less traffic deaths than US. It's Bosnia and Herzegovina by the way. And it's at 13.5.
USA is crazy unsafe for a developed country, and it barely matters if you compare with sparsely populated Canada (5.2) or Sweden (2.0), or densely populated Germany (3.7) or Japan (2.1).
It's not about population nor population density. It's not about wealth. It's not about population distribution.
It's about car-centrism and insane design.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
I would also argue the US is more successful than literally every other country in part because of fast road infrastructure. So maybe they’re all just making the wrong tradeoff.
~20 000 fewer people dying per year.
> I wouldn’t want the difference between 12.9 and 7.4 if it means I need to give up on driving cars
You don't need to give up driving cars. People do drive cars outside USA.
> slow inconvenient public transit
When it's done right it's more convenient than cars. I own a car and I drive under 3000 km per year because I just barely need it.
> I would also argue the US is more successful
The only metric I can think of where this is true is military, which does not seem relevant :)
Do you volunteer to be one of the 5.5 in your slice of 100K?
Which is worse, having a 1% chance of dying in a car accident, or spending an extra hour/day stuck in traffic? I think I might take the first option; it delivers a higher expected number of hours of life not stuck in traffic.
The third choice is stop building in such a way that these wide and fast roads are needed.
Meanwhile just slowing the fuck down on residential streets is a choice anyone can make and not at all a comparable situation.
Please dispense with the classic HN whataboutism, as it's not curious conversation and contravenes the comment guidelines.
1. If the US would have safer streets/roads/... and overall more human-oriented city design some people would walk to their destinations.
Look at this stupidity, and this is a new community: https://youtu.be/9-QGLfWSrpQ?si=bsTbq0cdMltXEzU5&t=299
Also some more people would bike to their destinations. Some people would take take public transit.
And guess what, that means that in the end, fewer people drive so there's less traffic, and on empty streets going 30kmph on average, you get where you want faster than in stop and go or constantly merging traffic that has posted speed limits of 50 kmph. As people say, driving in the Netherlands is world class, and that's <<because>> the Netherlands has tons of cyclists, not <<despite>> them.
2. You know or should know that it's not about you dying in your car. These days cars are incredibly safe tanks for those inside. You're more likely to kill someone <<outside>> your car.
3. Other people have pointed out the logical fallacy, already.
People often say "this is why we can't have nice things"... Such policies are the "nice things".
https://www.dutchreach.org/car-child-murder-protests-safer-n...
To make car infrastructure "sufficient" you are required to make roads wider, which reduces the quality of life of those living in the city, and perversely increases the demand for car transport eventually leading to more traffic jams. Bikes, even in high traffic situations, move faster than cars that are stationary.
And yes, cars are very safe — but only for those inside of them. As they get bigger, heavier and with taller bumpers they get more and more deadly for pedestrians and cyclists.
If you keep getting your car dinged on narrow roads, your insurance payouts will be larger than if you run over someone. Dings add up to a lot, but hitting a pedestrian maxes out the payout before the guy makes it out of the emergency room.
This is why Massachusetts drivers have a bad rep. Lots and lots of minor accidents in dense traffic. But MA itself it one of the safest places in the US
Drivers don't follow traffic rules. They follow the rules that appear to make sense for the scenario they're in.
No matter how many 15 mph speedlight signs you put up on a wide street, the driver will subconsciously speed through a wide street because the brain is stupid like that.
Want drivers to stop before the footpath, raise it up. It'll make them feel like they're off-the-road and they'll slow down.
Everything about cars is associated with perceptions.
Families buy heavy cars for the perception of safety, but instead have a vehicle that is harder to turn and is more likely to end up in a ditch. They buy taller vehicles to feel safe but have instead purchased a massive blindspot notorious for trampling over your own children. Unprotected bike lanes look like shoulder lanes you can serve into, and that's how drivers treat them.
You're absolutely correct about the feeling of discomfort when driving through narrow lanes.
The biggest lie we tell is that cars are safe. No, you're wielding the most lethal murder weapon in the country, with almost zero training and 1 mistake is all it takes to get a prison sentence.
They should feel uncomfortable.
> 1 mistake is all it takes to get a prison sentence
On the contrary, on top of everything you've pointed out, if you do kill someone (or multiple someones) at the wheel of a car you're unlikely to get more than a few months in prison AT MOST.
At this point, having a child that's escaped scott-free from a hit-n-run is part of billionaire-bingo.
In typical HN fashion, I would suggest looking into using Tippecanoe to generate some vector tiles of the data and host that on S3. Then the DB can fall back to performing simple lookups via the accident ID. Filtering by time will need to move to the frontend, but that should be fine (if not, look into clustering the data at further zoom levels).
If the bottle-neck is the DB and you haven't enabled the PostGIS extension, I'd look into that as the other commenter mentioned. If it's your server, then yes look into pre-generating all the tiles and hosting them elsewhere, but this might then mean switching over to MapLibre/Mapbox (which is what most companies end up using because of Leaflet's limitations).
For filtering on the frontend, I'd look into Expressions so you're not regenerating the GeoJSON collection every time (this causes a significant delay and flicker).
- https://maplibre.org/maplibre-style-spec/expressions/
- https://maplibre.org/maplibre-gl-js/docs/examples/hover-styl...
Is your server on that list?
j/k, I’m sorry, I’ll see myself out XD
We were also recently featured on the motherduck blog https://motherduck.com/blog/pushing-geo-boundaries-with-moth...
Unfortunately this dataset doesn't include the, probably more frequent, severe TBIs. Surely wouldn't take many patients for the cost of a hemicraniectomy, 2 week neuro-ICU stay, trach/peg, and long term acute care stay to equal the cost of a few measures to slow drivers down. Not to mention lost earning/tax potential. Too bad it's not from the same budget.
Wear your seatbelt and a helmet and hopefully you can avoid the pain of your family having to have a surprise end-of-life discussion with me.
RIP fr fr
And if there isn't one, your problem isn't traffic calming, your problem is the lack of bus lane
Wider travel lanes on normal streets? More signalized intersections with overrides for emergency services instead of roundabouts, stop signs, or other measures meant to decrease intersection accidents and fatalities? Removal of speed bumps, raised pedestrian crosswalks, etc.? Additional lanes so ambulances have space to pass other cars?
Sure, they could all ostensibly improve ambulance travel times. But they'd do so by dramatically increasing the number of fatalities on our streets. Not to mention the workload on those same emergency services. So while it can make sense to consider the impact on those services, they probably shouldn't be the driving factor. Or even a main one.
On the other hand, even if speed bumps and other measures cause minor delays, other changes might be able to balance them out. Dedicated bus lanes, for example, are basically exclusive express lanes you could choose to route emergency service vehicles down with potentially significant time savings.
Maybe they would interfere with looking over your shoulder.
The city grid is mainly to blame. The city grid of most American cities is uniquely bad - filled with streets which run at right angles to each other.
Take a look at Brussels vs Queens New York. Brussels had 5 road deaths in one year. Queens New York averages 75/year. That's almost a 7x difference adjusted for population.
Brussels has as an extremely irregular and walkable grid. Queens, like Manhattan, is full of dumb dangerous straight-lined roads and 90 degree angles.
The more irregular the grid the lower the traffic fatalities (assuming you're in a high-income country).
Why do suburbs have cul-de-sacs? They have curves, and They are useless as roads. They force cars to slow down, and disincentivize automobile traffic. Ergo, less cars, and your kids might get away with playing in the street without getting hit.
Rip up the grid and build a walkable community. It won't be cheap. Upzone and lower property taxes for any private developer that builds affordable housing on a walkable grid in your city.
There's only one place in the United States that's trying - Culdesac Tempe in Arizona. Northeast/California NIMBYs won't let you dare try to fight off their localism. They vote. Do you vote?
Number of traffic deaths in Brussels in strangely fluctuating, one year it's 6, the other it's 20+. Might be a COVID thing. Still less than Queens.
So... Queens has 37% more cars yet 300% - 800% more deaths...
For example, I can see the death in front of my house from a year ago, which was the driver suffering a heart attack while driving. He was the only victim and it wasn’t the crash that killed home.
Would love to be able to compare areas for things like:
- DUI - speeding/reckless driving - cycling victims - pedestrian victims - multiple vs single vehicle - medical cause
They often include things like "path of accident" so you can even run queries and ask questions like "how many vehicles flipped over before crashing" or "how many passengers get ejected from the vehicle before dying" or even "how often are snow banks involved in crashes?"
Odd things last I checked in 2015:
More people die in Texas than California. In total. Not per capita.
Most people in Florida die between 7pm and 9pm which is far later than most other states.
Pedestrians usually die at night.
Anyways, a great database last I used it: https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-report...
Also per capita, It is not possible for more people to die in Texas and not beat California for per capita metrics given the lower Texas population.
Imagine a town that has 100 cars in it and 10 traffic deaths per year vs a town that has 10,000 cars in it and also 10 traffic deaths per year. Both towns have the same population. Without any sort of normalization the towns look the same, but clearly very different things are going on in those scenarios and a per mile or per car or whatnot will help you identify that. Obviously it doesn't give you any sort of root cause but it is an indicator that a deeper investigation is needed.
Human life being valuable does not change that certain activities carry a certain amount of risk, and so of course the more you do that activity the more likelihood the risk manifests. It is valuable information to know if one area has a hugely disproportionate number of traffic deaths compared to overall traffic metrics.
e.g. let's say I'm picking between two cities for my next job. Every day I will drive 25 miles to work, regardless of which city I choose. I look at the stats and see that in X city, there is 1 traffic death per 10,000,000 miles driven. In Y city, there is 1 traffic death per 100,000 miles. Therefore if I live in Y city I am 100x more likely to be involved in a fatal traffic accident. That is very relevant info to me and doesn't cheapen the value of human life at all.
and
``` ncaught (in promise) SyntaxError: Unexpected token '<', " <!doctype "... is not valid JSON ```
https://mark.stosberg.com/the-most-dangerous-intersections-f...
One thing that's striking at is that the fatality locations do nor correlate with the "highest crash rate" locations hardly at all.
The intersection where you are most likely to get hit has a high pedestrian volume and often (in theory) low speed traffic.
While the fatalities here are more likely to happen on high speed streets, sometimes in locations where no one expecting a pedestrian.
Put another way: if we were try to fund "fixes" for the locations with fatalities, it would be mostly locations with a single fatality at those locations, while we have plenty of locations that have several pedestrian-involved crashes per yet.
Please enjoy complimentary load death. Would you like that mapped?
Assuming the data is being updated less often than hourly it should be relatively straight forward to generate a pmtiles tileset of the accident points, using either tippecanoe or planetiler — stick on something like s3, and have it basically scale infinitely.
Happy to help if needed!
Or you could host it with a plain old web server on a hosting platform that gives you fixed bandwidth for a fixed price. And it probably still scale well enough to survive a front page hug.
Is there a way to use the data to get a percentage or score for how dangerous a freeway is between 2 points on a map or something? Suggest an alternate freeway or intersections?
At the moment it's very very slow.
I was able to eventually load and click through to see broad details about a crash.
Pretty impressive collection of data.
Things that makes this difficult:
- Roads change overtime. Added stoplights, more lanes, added roundabouts. Dramatically change the rate.
- Volume of traffic. Deaths per cars would be interesting.
PS you may need to explicitly search to get results returned (I did)
https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-report...
The splash photos on that website says it all.
Any plans to add search/filter functionality?
edit: while u fix it, what’s the source of the data? Did you get it from all of the state DoTs or is there a single set from the fed?
I did a crash analysis locally using the QGIS desktop software for some display and analysis, as well as Node.js and the Turf.js library when custom code was needed for spatial analsyis:
https://mark.stosberg.com/the-most-dangerous-intersections-f...
Put another way, what are you imagining would replace the current X/Y axis and still be relevant to this project?
Thanks for sharing (and good luck keeping the site up). It's the definition of morbidly interesting.
The split to 85 going south on 101 is a very bad place - 7 pins very close together.
Without this comment I would have had zero ability to discover that interaction was required.