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open-austin
ScrAPD - Analyze traffic fatalities in Austin
What problem are you trying to solve?
We are trying to solve 2 problems:
- The city does not provide a reliable data set of traffic fatalities:
- open data: https://data.austintexas.gov/Public-Safety/2017-APD-Traffic-Fatalities/ijds-pcyq
- APD reports: http://austintexas.gov/department/news/296
- The users need to be able to visualize the data (i.e. with graphs or maps), and generate reports for a given period of time.
Who will benefit (directly and indirectly) from your project?
Mostly local organizations interested in traffic safety (Pedestrian Advisory Council (PAC), Bicycle Advisory Council (BAC), Vision Zero) and anyone else looking for current human and machine readable traffic fatality data.
What other resources/tools are currently serving the same need? How does your project set itself apart?
For existing resources, see section above.
The ScrAPD project is compose of 3 projects:
- A tool to retrieve the data from the APD report website and convert it into various formats.
- The data sets
- A visualization dashboard giving the users a graphical visualization of the data they are searching.
Where can we find any research/data available/articles?
- 2018 PAC retrospective presentation
- The Statesman
- DWI Insights, a prior Open Austin project. (blog post)
What help do you need now?
The most immediate needs is to create the visualization dashboard.
Managing the data sets would also require some help. Using the raw data to create curated/enhanced data sets would absolutely benefit the users.
The extractor is feature complete and in maintenance mode at this point.
What are the next steps (validation, research, coding, design)?
Building a team, working on the data and display it.
Current status:
- ScrAPD and the documentation
- ScrAPDviz
- The data sets
Project management
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Hey, you're official! You're now part of the growing civic hacking community in Austin. Here's a few things to get started (a couple you've probably already done).
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@rgreinho this looks really cool, nice work. Have you spoken to any potential end-users yet? I'm trying to wrap my head around what problems they would solve using a viz like this.
Yes I did, and this project already has potential users waiting for it: Pedestrian Advisory Council (PAC), Bicycle Advisory Council (BAC), Vision Zero.
Basically, every month they do the following:
- Browse through http://austintexas.gov/department/news/296
- Manually add new fatality details into a spreadsheet
- Create a monthly report
- At the beginning of the year they compile all the data they collected and generate a retrospective of the previous year
The goal of these projects, in addition to the ones mentioned above, is to remove the need for them to perform any manual task. Let ScrAPDviz do the work you need, stop using a spreadsheet.
The best place to get the most accurate fatality data is from the FARS database, but it's not as up-to-date as TxDOT's CRIS database.
APD sends the crash report to TxDOT and then TxDOT uploads crash data to CRIS. CRIS shows BOTH fatalities and non-fatality crashes. There's a lag between when the crash happens, when it gets put into CRIS, and when details get finalized and finally get sent over to NHTSA. However I've personally matched CRIS to FARS and didn't find any discrepancies. The CRIS public database has mapping capabilities.
https://cris.dot.state.tx.us/public/Purchase/app/home/welcome https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-reporting-system-fars
I haven't compared the city's Vision Zero dashboard with ScrAPD feature-for-feature, but it might supersede this project entirely. Most impactful Code for America projects become blueprints for services provided by the government, so being superseded is a good result.
Yes, the official Vision Zero dashboard definitely supersedes this project.
The only 2 reasons I keep this project up and running are:
- I show the names of the victims. It is a requirement for some local organizations.
- I check APD data hourly. The city updates the dataset on a monthly or bi-monthly basis.
I agree that ScrAPD's project work was a useful product demonstration that helped inspire the Vision Zero Viewer team. Our team at ATD collaborated with @rgreinho during the project planning and implementation. Definitely a success in that way.
