A few days ago I was reviewing Washington, D.C.’s Vision Zero Crash site and realized that an essential component of this site and many others was an actual map that showed where pedestrian and cyclist crashes were occurring. The DC Vision Zero dashboard lets users easily filter the data to view crashes based on the year, month and other attributes.
Unfortunately, San Antonio’s Transportation department doesn’t exactly do that. San Antonio’s Vision Zero map cannot be filtered directly on the map and I have a hunch that the data displayed and data available on San Antonio’s Open Data site is only for severe pedestrian and cyclist injury areas in the city, which is important information! I’m not sure why the City doesn’t just put the data directly into their Open Data portal – maybe because it’s easy for anyone to just go to the Texas DOT crash query site and get it themselves?
After reviewing the D.C. dashboard, I went back to my data for San Antonio and realized (with a massive face palm) that I didn’t grab the location of the crashes. After stewing about this for several minutes, I reacquired crash data for 2013 that included the street name, street number, latitude and longitude.
The end goal is to create a Vision Zero dashboard for San Antonio. The final product will be a web application that includes all the user-friendly functions of the best Vision Zero dashboards I’ve seen – an easy-to-read map, filter capabilities, and charts.
I’ve started the mapping process with a very rough map I created of the 2013 data using the leaflet R package. I then created a basic RShiny web app for 2013 data showing the location of pedestrian and cyclist crashes along with the types of injuries associated with each record in the dataset. The app can be found at this link –> https://aj-vision-zero.uc.r.appspot.com/.
Any and all feedback is much appreciated and requested! This is a rough version 1 prototype so any feedback that will help make the app more user-friendly while also providing essential information on the state of San Antonio’s Vision Zero policies.
***Update: As of 4/11/2023, pedestrian and cyclist crash data from 2013-2016 is now available on the web app!
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