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Mapping Motor Vehicle Collisions in New York City

toddwschneider.com

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Re: Mapping Motor Vehicle Collisions in New York City

#21

Post by cimmanom »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #5
mikeash wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the basis for the severity weights? I’d expect the weights to be way more spread out, like 1/10/100/1000. It would definitely not be a good trade off to eliminate nine non-injury crashes at the cost of one additional fatality. But I certainly could be missing something about this sort of evaluation.

Fatalities are a tiny minority of crashes and aren't really interesting to study because usually you basically wind up studying the behavior of drunk people and people who don't wear seat-belts and if you filter those out there's not much data left making meaningful conclusions hard to draw. Fatal accidents are often just normal accidents with a couple aggravating variables on top (e.g. person rear ends semi-truck in…

They’re a relatively high percentage of vehicle-pedestrian and vehicle-bicycle collisions, though. Very important for a pedestrian-oriented city like NYC.

Re: Mapping Motor Vehicle Collisions in New York City

#23

Post by toast0 »

xyzwave wrote: post #19

Having done something similar for the Long Beach, CA area in college, one of the most interesting takeaways was the relative spatial distribution between fatal and non-fatal accidents. Non-fatal accidents clearly clustered around high traffic areas, but fatal accidents didn’t reveal the same clustering. Instead they appeared to be uniformly distributed across the city. I’m sure there is an explanation in this, and th…

I suspect that fatal accidents that are due to roadway design issues are more likely to result in the roadway being changed quickly; so it doesn't happen again. Especially if the fatalities are at the scene.

Minor accidents can happen for years at the same intersection, because of the same design issues, without triggering urgent followup, if it doesn't somehow trigger a response from officials.

Re: Mapping Motor Vehicle Collisions in New York City

#24

Post by magduf »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #3

Drivers mostly hit other things when there's too many things demanding their attention (poor visibility + difficult left turn + busy traffic + bikes + pedestrians = high risk of accidents) so this is probably just a heat map of intersections that are the busiest (in terms of things going on, not necessarily throughput). I'd like to see a month by month heat map.

>Drivers mostly hit other things when there's too many things demanding their attention

And this is exactly why humans shouldn't be driving. Hopefully human driving will be banned before too long, as machines can do it so much better.

Re: Mapping Motor Vehicle Collisions in New York City

#25

Post by icsllaf »

xyzwave wrote: post #19

Having done something similar for the Long Beach, CA area in college, one of the most interesting takeaways was the relative spatial distribution between fatal and non-fatal accidents. Non-fatal accidents clearly clustered around high traffic areas, but fatal accidents didn’t reveal the same clustering. Instead they appeared to be uniformly distributed across the city. I’m sure there is an explanation in this, and th…

High traffic areas tend to move traffic much slower than lower density areas. Getting into a fatal traffic crash when going 15 miiles per hour in stop and go traffic is much harder than when you lose control of a car when going 50 on an empty street.

Re: Mapping Motor Vehicle Collisions in New York City

#27

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

bonyt wrote: post #20

The map of total deaths includes a significant blip on the west side near Pier 40 and the Holland Tunnel, which I think is from the 2017 truck attack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_New_York_City_truck_attac... Map: https://imgur.com/a/jNbOv7W

That area has a higher rate of incidents in general because of Brooklynites trying to avoid the excessive toll on Verrazano when leaving the city.

Re: Mapping Motor Vehicle Collisions in New York City

#28

Post by anitil »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #5
mikeash wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the basis for the severity weights? I’d expect the weights to be way more spread out, like 1/10/100/1000. It would definitely not be a good trade off to eliminate nine non-injury crashes at the cost of one additional fatality. But I certainly could be missing something about this sort of evaluation.

Fatalities are a tiny minority of crashes and aren't really interesting to study because usually you basically wind up studying the behavior of drunk people and people who don't wear seat-belts and if you filter those out there's not much data left making meaningful conclusions hard to draw. Fatal accidents are often just normal accidents with a couple aggravating variables on top (e.g. person rear ends semi-truck in…

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