Crash Stat

http://crashstat.org

 

Goals

Transportation Alternatives (TA) has been serving the pedestrian and bike travel routes for safer transportation and streets of the New York City. TA has an aim to nurture street safety measures with a protected landscape for secure passage of the pedestrians and cyclists by raising awareness amongst the City agencies and the concerned officials. From pedestrian plazas, parking protected bike lanes, pedestrian crossings and car parking, it is the right of the commuters to have an accident-free travel. CrashStat.org is the project of TA that serves this very purpose by listing the vehicle crashes with pedestrians and bicyclists on New York City’s streets.

 

Zero tolerance policy for the traffic deaths and street injuries is the main objective of TA that calls for a highly sophisticated map layout of the street mishaps that occurred in NYC to be delivered via CrashStat.org. And the map itself would serve as a strong reference point for the daily commuters on NYC streets.

 

The Challenge

Over 220,000 pedestrians and bicyclists who were killed or injured on the New York City’s streets since 1995 comprised of a huge data that needed to be embedded on the actual street map. With clearly marked points of the crash intersection and the relevant details of the type of accident and vehicles involved had to be well integrated on the map. Transportation Alternatives selected Xululabs to re-engineer their website by applying rigorous mapping techniques. The need for deep level filters that could help to make search faster and precise with no delayed results was the main challenge met by Xululabs. The crash details encompassing the toll of street deaths and injuries, motorist types, pre-crash actions and the location with the contributing factors for the traffic violence, etc., were some of the challenges addressed by Xululabs. The need was for an extremely user-friendly, dynamically structured street map. The graphical representation of the compiled data would also be included.

Xululabs strategized in many ways for the accomplishment of the desired goals of the important map layout and its working:

  • View expose filter with the help of GMap module will assist in showing or hiding the contents from the map by the selected options.
  • The expose view module is fast way of filtering and searching the results. Users can search for crashes by street address, ZIP code or any other combination of address information that Google Maps can geocode. Year range selection is similarly applicable.
  • Handling the number of users hitting the map with faster query results using Apache Solr search engine.
  • Dynamic pop ups with crash data and custom area selection on the map will leverage an engaging user interface.
  • Integration of the map with the social media such as Facebook and Twitter applications.

 

Solution

Xululabs came up with an innovative usage of Google map modules in Drupal which created a visionary street map of the NYC with the exact number and exact place of the accidents.

The Google Maps APIs were applied heavily to create a dynamic web based map with icons. Blue and red markers represent the total number of pedestrian and bicyclist crashes on the map. Clicking on an intersection marker will show the relevant data and graph of crashes. The pedestrian and cyclist fatalities are shown with a different icon for quick reference on the map. The red and blue markers increase in size if the number of injuries/fatalities is more as per the categorization of the number of such incidents.

The GMap module was integrated for an interactive user interface to pop up content on clickable map. Users can click on each crash intersection and view a popup window summarizing the number and type of crashes per year selected. Results are also shown with a histogram representation. Layers for displaying borough and Community District boundaries can be done in similar way.

The advanced filter criterion was added to the map to check the rate of accidents based upon the age and sex of the pedestrian or bicyclist struck, the type of vehicle (car, truck or bus) that struck the pedestrian or cyclist, pedestrian’s action at the intersection, the contributing factors to the crashes (such as unsafe speed or driver inattention), etc.

Location-wise you can see crash statistics by neighborhood, community board, City Council district, NYPD precinct and several other geographic and political boundaries.

Users can click on the selected political region that is highlighted and divided into smaller areas. Each area with a balloon can be clicked upon to view its crash statistics.

Users can also locate their custom area on the map to find crash summaries therein. This dynamic feature is implemented with an arbitrary polygon that is drawn on the map with the help of Google Maps API (Interactive Polyline Encoder Utility). User can click on certain places and join them in the shape of a polygon. The highlighted area has a fine grained grid of points (spaced 250ft apart, roughly the size of a small street block) that can be clicked upon to check casualties in that selected range.

Year selector slider was provided for ease of checking the accidents’ details of a particular year from 1995-2009.  Street address can also be entered to display particular street mishaps.

A swift approach and a pre-planned commuting mapped out for easy user reference accounts for better streets designing and safer walking/cycling routes. Xululabs applied one-click precise elements on the mapping technique with time-saving data display using Apache Solr search engine system. Apache Solr is used as search server for fast response and advanced features like faceted search. All search requests are based on current bounds of the map and enabled filters for improved performance. Google geocoding service is used to provide street search. The status bar at the bottom of the map shows the current map status, Ajax request information and the data processing time taken by the Apache Solr server.

 

Outcomes

CrashStat is a special project of Transportation Alternatives in light of the accident prone streets of the New York City. It is a public safety measure brought to life by Xululabs for the bicyclists and pedestrians to enjoy a secure route in their daily travel needs. It also aims at creating awareness for the concerned authorities to come up with a more people-centric road construction plan and strict application of the traffic laws.

User-friendly street level data display assists in a safer public transit on the NYC streets. Social network sharing of the mishaps drawn on the street map allows for the right awareness in the mass media in fighting for safer streets. CrashStat.org paves the way for tackling dangerous driving behaviors and reducing the number of vehicle crashes and fatal accidents. It surely leaves one wondering it’s high time we re-engineered our roadmap!

  • In the NYDailyNews.com

The success rate of CrashStat.org speaks for itself in its highlighted news story in the Daily News. As the reporter suggests you can always watch your back with CrashStat!

Read the complete story here:

http://origin.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypolitics/2011/10/watch-your-back-with-crashstat

Portfolio Image: 
Date: 
Tuesday, April 29, 2014