Authors: Nordine Aouni, Simon Wengeler
Motor vehicle collisions in New York City
In June 2012, New York City's officials committed to publish online all records of future vehicle collisions occurring on the city’s roads. Their goal was to allow the public to learn more about road safety in the city which happens to be the purpose of our analysis. Between the publication of this data set and the day we started our investigation, more than 1.3 million collisions occurred. Therefore, in order to make sense of this tremendous amount of information we decided on two main approaches.
First of all, we looked at the spatial component of these collisions. With in mind the goal to point out locations subject to many accidents and provide insight into the problem. We, for instance, compared road safety in different neighborhoods.
Collisions in New York City
Then, we focused on the temporal nature of these events. Our objective was to identify and highlight trends in the underlying data. To do so, we looked at what characterized these collisions and how these characteristics evolved over time.
Deaths, injuries and death percentage over time
Finally, we also studied the immediate causes of these accidents in order to provide more insight into road safety in the streets of New York City. Our findings and observations are all summarized in this video.