Writing about cities
My first trip of 2012 was to Richmond, Virginia, to travel with my friend who is racing (in 60 minutes) in the North American Cycle Courier Championships (NACCC, see more photos).
I went for a two hour walk today (got a haircut, too) around Carytown and neighboring districts. The homes here are beautiful.
The photos are actually from yesterday. More will come later.
For an article I’m writing for Architect’s Newspaper about the Chicago Forward CDOT Action Agenda, I wanted to know about traffic injuries and fatalities in the United States, but compared to the Netherlands and Denmark and other places with a Vision Zero campaign (to have 0 traffic deaths each year).
I already knew the OECD had a good statistics database and web application. With a few clicks, I can quickly get a table of traffic injuries (casualties) listing just the countries I want. I can easily select the years I want, too.
In one more click the web application will show a time animated bar chart. A feature I’d like to see added is dividing the figure (in this case traffic injuries) by the population. Check out the video to see what it looks like. The United States looks to be in terrible shape, but our country has several times more residents.
I had trouble downloading and opening the CSV file of the data table I created. The XLS file was damaged, also. The built-in Mac OS X Archive Utility app couldn’t open the .gz file, but I used The Unarchiver app successfully.
My calculations, based on data from OECD (national population and traffic fatalities), Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT), and the American Community Survey:
Fatalities per 100,000 in 2009
Chicago’s fatality rate per 100,000 citizens in 2009 was 16.75 (473 deaths on the roads). The fatality rate dropped in 2010: just 11.65 deaths per 100,000 residents (315 deaths on the roads; the population also decreased).
Updated September 28, 2012, to add the United Kingdom.
The CTA Morgan Green/Pink Lines station had a soft opening today. No press conference, no fanfare. I learned about the opening the night before on Twitter.
This station makes several strong statements: it clearly identifies the CTA as the organization that services this building, this operation, this monument to efficient transportation. The MORGAN STATION text tells you where you are, and you can read it from blocks away. And the artistic bike parking with a sufficient storage quantity says that the neighborhood will be biking here. Continue reading
The following is an email conversation between myself and Travis Wittwer, a cool guy in Portland, Oregon, whom I stayed with in April 2010. We’ve had similar conversations before about the language writers (mainly newspaper article authors) use when speaking about and describing situations where “people and their bicycles make contact with people and their cars” (yes, there’s an easier way to say that, read on).
Travis: Continue reading
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: