Thank you to the Bay Citizen, Gapers Block, and the Chicago Bicycle Advocate (lawyer Brendan Kevenides). They’ve all written about the bike crash map I produced using Google Fusion Tables. And WGN 720 AM interviewed me and aired it in April 2011.
View the map now. The map needs to be updated with injury severity, a field I mistakenly removed before uploading the data.
The Bay Citizen started this by creating their own map of bike crashes for San Francisco, albeit with more information. I had helped some UIC students obtain the data from the Illinois Department of Transportation for their GIS project and have a copy of it myself. I quickly edited it using uDig and threw it up online in an instant map created by Fusion Tables.
A guy rides his bicycle on the “hipster highway” (aka Milwaukee Avenue), the street with the most crashes, but also has the most people biking (in mode share and pure quantity).
Why did I make the map?
I made this project for two reasons: One is to continue practicing my GIS skills and to learn new software and new web applications. The second reason was to put the data out there. There’s a growing trend for governments to open up their databases, and your readers have probably seen DataSF.org’s App Showcase. But in Chicago, we’re not seeing this trend. Instead of data, we get a list of FOIA requests, or instead of searchable City Council meeting minutes, we get PDFs that link to other PDFs that you must first select from drop down boxes. But both of these are improvements from before.
I would love to help anyone else passionate about bicycling in Chicago to find ways to use this data or project to address problems. I think bicycling in Chicago is good for many people, but we can make it better and for more people.