The Chicago Crashes page that is hosted on Chicago Cityscape shows weekly and year-to-date crash statistics along with estimated costs of those crashes, broken down by person type. Today I published a major change to present the stats better, in a way that matches the costs of the crash that are said to be different based on the person’s situation – whether they were a pedestrian, bicyclists, or motor vehicle occupant – in the crash. Prior to this change, every person in the crash was assigned the same monetary cost as “driver” even if they were a pedestrian or bicyclist.

Improved cost tables

The “Costs of these crashes” tables have two improvements.

  • Each injury-severity column now shows a count alongside the dollar figure, so you can see exactly how many people of each type were killed, had incapacitating injuries, or had non-incapacitating injuries for the selected time period. This makes it easier to verify the numbers and understand the scale behind the cost estimates.
  • The tables previously listed three person-type rows: Driver/Passenger, Pedestrian, and Bicycle. The CPD dataset actually includes six person types. The two remaining types — non-motor vehicle occupants and non-contact vehicle occupants — were being silently folded into the Driver/Passenger row. They now appear in their own “Other” row.

What’s interesting is the differences in value. Pedestrian is “worth” less than bicyclist. Cost estimates use values from the CDC’s WISQARS Cost of Injury study and vary by injury severity and person type.

  • A pedestrian who is killed is said to result in $14,169 in medical costs and $10,500,000 in non-medical costs, totaling $10,514,169
  • A bicyclist who is killed is said to result in $19,750 in medical costs and $10,800,000 in non-medical costs, totaling $10,819,750
  • A motor vehicle occupant who is killed is said to result in $11,556 in medical costs and $10,600,000 in non-medical costs, totaling $10,611,556

I haven’t figured out why the pedestrian has a lower non-medical cost.

A note on count differences

You may notice that the injury counts in the “Costs of these crashes” table differ slightly from the totals in the “killed or injured” summary above it. This is expected and I will try to reconcile them 1:1 soon. The two figures come from two Chicago Police Department datasets and may be modified at certain times in ways that my import system does not catch. They differ by a small number of records at any given time.

Crash data is sourced from the Traffic Crashes — Crashes and Traffic Crashes — People datasets on the Chicago Data Portal.