
US Road Fatalities 2001-09 mapped with OpenStreetMap - harrylove
http://map.itoworld.com/road-casualties-usa
======
AmericanOP
Not 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 safety rules I'm planning. No car
commercial road joyriding. Lots of yellow in the hills. Highway driving seems
to be relatively safe, which is comforting. Extreme caution at intersections
(look at the bay bridge on-ramp). No riding at night.

~~~
barrkel
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 mostly highway riding, without a
significant filtering component, I wouldn't bother with a bike.

So yes, you'll want to spend some time in the hills and curves. Don't start on
an all-out superbike with torque that kicks in suddenly at high revs; start
with something with a flatter torque curve, like a midrange twin (e.g. SV650
or Ninja 650r) or detuned 600. An unfaired bike, if you don't mind the looks,
will feel faster from the wind blast. Most of the fun in a bike is from
acceleration and corners, and on the street rather than on a track you'll want
to have that fun at perhaps surprisingly low speeds. Taking a tight corner at
30mph is harder than it looks, takes more skill than a long curve at 90, and
is a lot less dangerous if you crash. I've had a low-sider on my scooter (it
was new to me and I didn't know its lean angle limits well enough) at about
25mph in a t-shirt and jeans (but full-face helmet, as always), and walked
away with nothing more than a scratch on my arm and a few more scratches on
the fairing.

You'll remember the first time a corner surprises you by tightening up half-
way through. But the real warning signs come earlier than that IMO: if you
find yourself letting off the throttle half-way through a turn rather than
smoothly accelerating through it, or changing gear half-way through, that's a
sign of poor technique and / or poor reading of the road. Even more
dangerously, you can end up learning these mid-course correction habits and
think you're doing well, building false confidence.

Bikes are fantastic fun and don't let the raw statistics dissuade you too
much. You'll see a lot of idiots on the road doing stupid things, and get a
better idea of where the stats come from. Filtering, where legal, can be
intoxicatingly enjoyable. And you'll appreciate differences in road geography
to a huge degree.

I've ridden in Belgium, Netherlands, northern CA, northwest France,
Luxembourg, UK and Germany, in approximately increasing order of fun, though
for different reasons. Belgium has terrible (back) roads and is mostly flat;
northern CA has some very curvy roads, but they are often very narrow, poorly
surfaced and have double-yellow no-overtaking lines to an extreme; though it
does have filtering. UK also has many fairly poor country roads - a lot of
hedges blocking views - but makes up for it with filtering. Germany is
strictly anti-filtering, but has very high standards even for curvy minor
roads, which are wide and have high speed limits (depending on state).

(I own a scooter and a big bike and live in London. Scooters are better for
filtering in the city, and a lot more practical. I don't own a car, and only
ever take public transport if I'll be consuming alcohol.)

~~~
lancewiggs
Friends don't let friends ride Kawasakis, especially Ninjas.

My pet theory is that each motorcycle has a use or personality, and after
riding it for a while your behaviour ends up matching the personality of the
bike.

BMW tourers make you want to ride the curves from coast to coast, but do so
safely. They don't mind a bit of speed, but are also content to cruise at
legal limits.

Harleys want you to cruise the straight desolate highways, without a helmet
(dumb, but if you are going to ride without a helmet, the a straight desolate
highway is the place to do it). They also like being polished and sitting in
front of cafes.

A trail bike wants you to turn left up that hill, and go explore, while a top
end enduro bike wants you to do that a bit too quickly. A KTM adventure (I
have one) wants you to load it up and blast across a desert, and does so
remarkably well.

Sports bikes, and the Ninja is the worst no matter what the size, want you to
crouch down and go as fast as possible. They eat away at your soul, and you
just have to go faster and faster. There's a bad ending waiting for you,
especially for early career riders.

So buy a bike that matches your use case.

The upright road/trail bike with a top box is an excellent all-round choice
for commuting, adventure and a bit of safe speed. (Triumph Tiger, BMW
F800GS/F65GS, BMWR1200GS, Yamaha XT etc). A sport bike is great if you are
able to use it on a track, or for the occasional blast in the desolate hills.
A laid back cruiser needs wide open spaces and lots of cafes - they are not
about safe speed or twisties.

But the ultimate use for a bike is travel, and the further the better. Get
something you are comfortable on for hours, and which has the ability to go on
anywhere.

~~~
barrkel
A Ninja 650r is not a Ninja like a ZX-R. It has the Ninja name in the US, but
it is not a supersport bike; it's a sport tourer. It's a parallel twin, and is
actually less aggressive to ride than the Suzuki SV650 - it doesn't even have
clip-on handlebars. It has an upright seating position, not crouched over. At
70bhp it's got lower power than most of the detuned 600cc inline-4 standards.

Personally, I don't like dual-purpose bikes. I think they're too tall, and I
never have need nor desire to go off-road in the least; for me, sport-touring
is optimal. I think dual-purpose bikes are a bit like urban 4x4s: most never
go off-road, and when they do, they're not actually very good at it. But of
course this is a personal preference.

~~~
lancewiggs
Great - the Ninja 650r sounds like a good commuter bike then, and 60-70HP is a
good range for a road bike. (I'm based in NZ - not the US market)

Dual purpose bikes are indeed harder to approach - the 1200GS Adventure I own
is a huge tall and bulky machine. It took me a long time to get into them, and
I started out with the smaller 650 GS series. They are however remarkably easy
to ride, and to do so in almost any condition. They make great commuter bikes
as you are much higher and generally have great luggage capacity and
robustness for the occasional spill. However you are essentially right - they
are not as good as a pure-purpose bike for a particular application. You can
dial in your degree of off and on roadability. KTM does the best hard core
adventure series, while take your pick for the soft roaders of dubious merit.
If you do get into it then BMW run excellent (though rare) off road courses.
We all had our bikes, mine a 1200GS, fully airborne on several occasion on my
course. And there's a really scary photo from that same course on my eponymous
blog header.

------
tobiasSoftware
I think a per-person version of this chart would be interesting as well,
dividing the map into regions, counting the number of accidents, and dividing
it by the number of people in the region. Placement of accidents is less
interesting than chance you will have an accident if you live there IMO. Still
cool though :)

~~~
PLejeck
East coast: death, west coast: not so death

~~~
pvarangot
Exactly, and the safest place to go drive your car through is the Grand
Canyon.

~~~
PLejeck
Absolutely, especially in the river.

------
dmvaldman
For 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.

<http://fathom.info/allstreets/>

~~~
Groxx
That is an awesome poster. Thanks for the link!

------
jamesbressi
Very well done. It would be interesting to have the ability to click on one of
the reports and get details--something I'm sure you would have done if it was
available or possible.

~~~
tomkinstinch
Toggling each type on/off might be interesting as well.

I was immediately curious if there is a cluster of bicyclist fatalities
anywhere. I clicked on the icons in the key expecting to change the visibility
of each category, but that did nothing.

~~~
PLejeck
I too was disappointed by that oversight.

------
laconian
Found my friend that died in 2002, though it only reported his death and not
his fiancee's as well.

What a sad nitpick! :(

~~~
PLejeck
Maybe the fiancee's icon is placed under their icon?

~~~
fennecfoxen
I saw some bicycle icons barely visible peeking around from behind car icons
at certain intersections. No way to see the bike icon. Weak UI design.

------
freejoe76
This 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...

~~~
jberryman
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.

~~~
dromidas
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.

------
xbryanx
I 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.

~~~
tmcw
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...](http://www.cartogrammar.com/blog/i-hate-your-favorite-election-
map/)

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.

------
forgottenpaswrd
I saw the death of a motorist. We were on the mountains, he was at more than
120mph in the straight part of the road(he passed over us), and as he took a
curve super fast, a van appeared on the other side of the road. Instant dead,
looking at him was the most horrible vision in my life. His friends(also
riders) will came later and cry.

It is strange, three people I knew from my college died on a very small
motorcycle with a very small curb on the road(two young girls and one boy, no
helmet). I could not believe it, it made no sense for three people to die on
such a small danger(I have seen MBT riders so much times do things x10000 more
dangerous).

Four young men and women from my village also died as they return from a
Spanish fiesta on the night.

In the North of Spain and Portugal non official "rallies" are the first cause
of dead on young people.

What is strange is that until looking at this map, I strangely believed those
accidents were "special", but it seems there are not.

------
benvanderbeek
I was involved in an accident where I caused a fatality in 1999 (guy sleeping
in my lane on a rural highway at 3am), so it's not on here. Otherwise I would
be able to say something about its accuracy and completeness.

------
steauengeglase
Interesting, looks like the previous owner neglected to tell me that someone
was killed in my driveway back in '07.

------
JshWright
I find this a little... disquieting... I know the story behind a dozen or so
of these little icons. Like any traumatic event, they'll come to mind from
time to time (some are more memorable than others, for some reason). Being
reminded of all of them at once is actually a little overwhelming.

It's also a bit of a disconnect seeing the chaos and trauma of some of those
scenes reduced to a tiny graphic.

------
tsumnia
Very awkward to see the number of deaths that I drive past daily... Even more
awkward to think I could have been a statistic on this site a few years ago!

The searching functionality could use some work. I was unable to input the
actual address of my accident and had to guess-timate. Like others said,
filtering would be highly appreciated as well.

------
eande
Great chart and SF downtown has a denser deep blue color; always suspected
that is a more risky place for pedestrian.

~~~
nostromo
If you think SF is bad, look at Manhattan.

What's with all the 99 year old deaths in NYC? Bad data?

~~~
PLejeck
I dunno, Manhattan is sloooooooow-moving, I'm not sure how you can fatally
injure somebody at 5MPH gridlock!

~~~
smallblacksun
A car can kill a pedestrian/bicyclist/motorcyclist at surprisingly low speeds.
It's almost impossible to kill someone in a car at under 25 MPH or so (unless
they drive off a cliff or something), but pedestrians can be killed by cars
going as slowly as 10 MPH (they get knocked off their feet and hit their
heads, usually). I read a very interesting paper by the NTSB or IIHS about
that, but can't find it now.

------
spec
Something very similar has been done years ago: <http://www.city-
data.com/accidents/acc-Chicago-Illinois.html>. Per-city mapping using Google
Maps with additional info and Google street map when clicking on each marker.

------
danso
There'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.

------
vcadambe
Here is a similar map of UK - <http://map.itoworld.com/>.

------
tux1968
The age of pedestrians killed in accidents was surprising to me. Of course I
didn't do an exhaustive scan, but everywhere I looked they were much older
than I imagined they'd be. Many seniors.

------
hesdeadjim
I would love to see this map annotated with fatalities involving blood alcohol
content > 0.08. Not sure if that information is made available though...

------
Florin_Andrei
Far more fatalities in the CA Central Valley than in the SF Bay Area, even
though the respective population densities are the other way round.

~~~
PLejeck
I can tell you, having lived my whole life in Modesto, the drivers here are
IDIOTS. I once saw a car that careened off a perfectly straight road, 90
degrees, over the sidewalk and into a fence.

------
ry0ohki
I'd love to see a similar map of airplane fatalities for those that are scared
of flying for a reassuring comparison...

------
tibbon
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.

------
RobSpectre
A lot of loved ones on this map.

------
vishaldpatel
It seems that walking is more dangerous than driving in San Francisco.

------
s00pcan
This is not very interesting without any ability to add a filter.

------
PLejeck
This has just reaffirmed my fear of east-coasters.

~~~
popdensity
You probably said this in jest, but if you look at a map of US population
density, it is nearly identical.

~~~
PLejeck
Well, it was mostly in jest, yes, but I think it's more than just that, I
think it's also that here on the west coast we tend to drive a lot better than
people in New York ;)

~~~
shawnc
Something I've noticed in Canada - is each province despises the drivers of
the province to their east. So BC complains about Alberta, Alberta about
Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan about Manitoba... and so on. Seems the same thing
happens west to east down there too.

~~~
rkowalick
What does Newfoundland complain about?

~~~
jarek
Saskatchewan.

------
motters
Is there anything like this for the UK?

~~~
jake_weston
Yes, exactly like this: <http://map.itoworld.com/road-casualties-uk>

------
wavephorm
I am never driving again.

