The Chicago Crash Browser as it looks now. This only exists on my laptop and no place else. I can’t put it online because it’s so inefficient it would kill the server. 

I presented my Chicago Crash Browser to attendees of an OpenGov Hack Night three weeks ago and gathered a lot of feedback and some interest from designers and programmers there.

We collaboratively came up with a new direction: instead of focusing on creating a huge web application that I proposed, we (anyone who wants to help) would start small with a website and a couple of crash data visualizations. The visualizations would serve two purposes:

  • attract attention to the project
  • start building a gallery of data-oriented graphics that describes the breadth and extent of the crash data

Per Derek Eder, they are called “slices”. I’ve come up with two so far. These two took me more time to develop and produce than I thought they would and I could have used data I’ve already published on Grid Chicago, but I wanted to continue growing the library of slices with new information.

The website is ChicagoCrashes.org (I also bought ChicagoCrashes.com) – they redirect to the “crash data” tag on Grid Chicago for now. I finalized the slices on Tuesday and I’ll work on getting them visualized, collaboratively, tonight at the next Hack Night (which is now at 1871 in the Merchandise Mart).

Slice 1 is a table (not shown) and list (below) showing the 10 most frequent vehicle type and vehicle use combinations in the automobile crash data provided by the Illinois Department of Transportation.

675,262 passenger car vehicles being used for personal use
85,010 SUV vehicles being used for personal use
73,256 passenger car vehicles being used for not in use
68,793 Unknown vehicles being used for Unknown
60,349 passenger car vehicles being used for unknown
53,082 Van-mini van vehicles being used for personal use
30,333 pickup truck vehicles being used for personal use
26,908 passenger car vehicles being used for Taxi/for hire
11,793 Van-mini van vehicles being used for Unknown
11,630 Tractor w/semi-trailer vehicles being used for Commercial – multi-unit

There are oddly a lot of unknowns in this dataset. 

Slice 2 comprises three figures that describe the mean vehicle occupancy (number of people per vehicle) for vehicles involved in crashes:

  • in 2010, inside Chicago: 1.1862211566515711 people per vehicle
  • in 2010, outside Chicago in Illinois: 1.3137496138646556
  • in 2005-2010, in Chicago: 1.1873268477598977