Pedestrian Crashes in Massachusetts by Age Group & Time of Day
Insights on Automobile Crashes Involving Bicycles and Pedestrians
By using R and Adobe Illustrator, with data sourced from the MassDOT IMPACT crash portal, I created visualizations of insights on automobile crashes involving pedestrians and bicycles to present to the Massachusetts Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Board. By analyzing various variables such as road conditions and kind of road, driver action, vehicle location, time of day I investigated conditions and potential reasons for these crashes.
Key Observations:
- There is a higher degree of bike crashes with heavy trucks
- Crashes involving younger victims increase in both volume and proportion around school start & end times, and after school activities
- A vast majority of crashes (around 95%) involve SUVs and passenger cars (which may be attributed to higher number of these vehicles types on the streets)
- There is a marked increase in crashes around 6pm
Challenges:
- Data Sources: Unclear ideas about secondary sources of data
- Intersections: No idea on vehicle volumes passing through individual intersections, although several proxy methods could be investigated
- School Zones: Data on school zone timings, and true geographical extents of school zone missing. We assume a 200 ft (about 61 m) radius from school point data as a ‘school zone’ for our analysis
- IMPACT Portal Improvements: Including a ‘FAQ’ style section, or posting standard/most frequently asked for data extracts
- Data Collection Improvements: Simplifying collected variables. Are all 115 variables collected on crashes required/impactful enough to collect? Do all police precincts report on, or have the personnel/technological capacity to collect these datapoints?
| Slide | Comments |
|---|---|
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Introduction: Summary statistics |
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Vehicle Type: Pedestrian crashes: overall, and severe crashes |
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Vehicle Type: Bicycle crashes: overall, and severe crashes |
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Hit & Run Cases: Pedestrian and bicycle crashes |
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Road Intersection Type & Vehicle Action: Severe pedestrian crashes |
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Road Intersection Type & Vehicle Action: Severe bicycle crashes |
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Age group & Time of Day: All pedestrian crashes |
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Age group & Time of Day: All bicycle crashes |
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School Zone & Age Group: Pedestrian and bicycle crashes |
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Conclusions: Observations & challenges |
Aseem Deodhar
Transportation Planner
My research interests include transit user behaviour, spatial movement pattern analysis, and transportation infrastructure.