Seems 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.
US Road Fatalities 2001-09 mapped with OpenStreetMap
61–70 of 104 posts
Re: US Road Fatalities 2001-09 mapped with OpenStreetMap
#62Not 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…
When you cut out really young people, inexperienced riders, people who haven't taken the MSF, intoxicated people and those on 600cc sport bikes... fatalities on a bike go down a great deal.
Many, but not all motorcycle wrecks are preventable. The guy in his mid 50's touring all around the US on his 1800cc Gold Wing is far far far less likely to get killed than a 21 year old who has 'a few drinks', and tries to impress his friends on his 600cc superbike around the city (and not wearing any gear).
Take joy rides. Learn how to use your bike. Hit the mountains. Don't be afraid of cornering- just learn how to do it. Night riding is sub-optimal I will agree, but don't be afraid to just slow down. A country road that I might rip down at 100mph during the day might become a 20mph road for me at night in the fog with bugs, recently rained on roads and deer.
Make sure your bike is well lit and you're wearing all your gear that you can stand to wear. If you're in SF like many people on HN, the weather is amicable to wearing almost full gear every day. In Austin or somewhere else hot, I doubt you could wear full gear in the summer.
Re: US Road Fatalities 2001-09 mapped with OpenStreetMap
#63There'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.
Re: US Road Fatalities 2001-09 mapped with OpenStreetMap
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
More 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.
I 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.
I 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?
Re: US Road Fatalities 2001-09 mapped with OpenStreetMap
#65I really wish maps like these would display their data on cartograms related to population - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram. The open west always makes my eye come up with false conclusions at first glance.
Re: US Road Fatalities 2001-09 mapped with OpenStreetMap
#66This 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...
some 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.
Vehicle 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.
Re: US Road Fatalities 2001-09 mapped with OpenStreetMap
#67Interesting, looks like the previous owner neglected to tell me that someone was killed in my driveway back in '07.
Re: US Road Fatalities 2001-09 mapped with OpenStreetMap
#68I really wish maps like these would display their data on cartograms related to population - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram . The open west always makes my eye come up with false conclusions at first glance.
Cartograms 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-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.
Re: US Road Fatalities 2001-09 mapped with OpenStreetMap
#69For 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.
Re: US Road Fatalities 2001-09 mapped with OpenStreetMap
#70Not 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…
Highway / motorway riding is excruciatingly boring, even in the absence of speed limits. I've ridden from London to Kiel in Germany and back a couple of times, via France and Luxembourg, and found it infinitely preferable to avoid motorways, even though it takes 3 days rather than one (long) day per leg. Doing 200km/h+ gets old really fast when you're going in a straight line. If you've got speed limits and intend on…
It's funny that you recommend a twin 650 or mono 600 as a starter bike. Not so long ago, these would be considered big boy bikes, suicidal for a beginner. I wonder what changed, the simple availability of bigger bikes or the improvement of bike safety ?
As for me, I'd recommend a tiny 250cc or even 125cc for a starter. A year or two later, you can always get a bigger one safely.