Using collision data provided by the New York Police Department, data scientist, software engineer, and analyst Todd W. Schneider recently created this colorful interactive map showing all of the 1.4 million incidents since 2012. The map allows you to filter by pedestrian injuries, cyclist injuries, driver injuries, and total collisions altogether. The brighter a spot is in an area of the map, the more incidents that occurred there.
The map shows the areas with the most injuries and fatalities, but I’m hesitant to use the phrase “most dangerous”, as the collisions data does not tell us how many motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians traveled through each area without injury. For example, more pedestrians are injured by motor vehicles in Times Square than in any other area, but Times Square probably has the most total pedestrians, so it’s possible that “pedestrian injuries per mile walked” is higher elsewhere. It might make for interesting further analysis to estimate total vehicle, bicycle, and pedestrian travel in each area, then attempt to calculate the areas with the highest probability of injury or fatality per unit of distance traveled.
If you enjoy a good data analysis, check out the accompanying article for a ton of takeaways, graphs, and charts stemming from this data.
