Jack Turek

One of the fun but frustrating things about working on a project is exploring the seemingly infinite number of possibilities and iterations that could make the project “cooler” or “better”. The fun part is thinking of new ways to show information. The frustrating part is realizing that to make the project that much cooler, you have to go back and re-download the data and go through the cleaning process again.

I’ve learned that lesson a couple times during this Vision Zero project. I first realized that demographic and injury data would be great to show in the dashboard, so I had to go back and add that data in. Then, I thought that it would be interesting to know the types of vehicles that are involved in crashes on San Antonio’s streets. Even if I’m not going to show the vehicle type in the dashboard, it could be useful to have for future analyses.

With that being said, I think I’ve conquered all the good ideas that have popped into my head and am happy to say that version 2 of San Antonio’s Pedestrian & Cyclist Crash Map is now available!

Here are some updates:

• I redid the layout of the web application to make it appear more like a “dashboard”. I think this makes it a little more user-friendly and readable.
• I added in a couple tables below the map showing the injury counts and some demographic data. The tables are something that I’ll continue to iterate on in subsequent updates since I’m not 100% happy with how they are right now. They provide some useful information, I just don’t think it’s presented in quite the right way just yet.
• Right now the data goes through 12/31/2022. In the next few days I’ll be adding in 2023 data on a monthly basis, beginning with May 2023. So the next update of the app will include January – May 2023 data.

Another import disclaimer: there’s data discrepancies. Data is only as good as the collection process and sometimes the collection process misses a few things.

I accessed all the crash data used in the dashboard from Texas’ Crash Record Information System (CRIS). Every time police respond to a car crash, there’s a specific form the police fill out that then gets uploaded into the Texas crash database. Sometimes, for some reason, not all the data is entered appropriately. This means that the data collected from CRIS is likely an undercount of the actual amount of crashes involving bicyclists and pedestrians in San Antonio.

While it’s frustrating that data can be missing and incomplete, that’s often the case with any dataset. I still think there’s value in showing where in San Antonio pedestrians and cyclists are being hit by cars.

If you’re interested in looking at San Antonio’s version of a Vision Zero map, you can find it here. This map only shows fatalities and serious injury locations. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it can be filtered for different years, but hopefully San Antonio’s Transportation Department does some more iteration on this.