The last week or so, I’ve been working on refining some aspects of my Vision Zero pedestrian/cyclist crash map for San Antonio. I think the updates do a couple things: 1) It’s easier to view the points on the map; and 2) it provides some more visual information.
Starting with viewing accessibility – all this really entailed was reducing the size of the points on the map. The previous version had heavier weighted points, which caused a lot of overlap of other points and the map of San Antonio itself. With smaller points, it’s easier to see location clusters of crashes and identify problematic locations.
Second, more visual information is on the map. Using a shapefile from San Antonio’s Open Data Portal, I’ve overlayed the city’s new redistricted City Council boundaries over the crash map. The districts are different colors and provide a quick, at-a-glance look at where crashes are occurring in each district.
In the future I plan to do some conditional formatting on the actual data pulled from CRIS, which will hopefully allow me to get an accurate count of crashes per City Council district. That data could then be paired with the city’s data on bike facilities to see which districts have the most/least bike facilities compared to crashes.
Here’s a more in-depth look at the most recent changes in the dashboard:
I reduced the size of the points representing pedestrian and bike crashes. In the original dashboard, they really popped out, making it more difficult to identify clusters of crashes and whether crashes occurred at intersections. The new size makes it easier to see all of San Antonio’s crashes at once and where in the city crashes are happening.
Another new feature allows users to select multiple injury types and multiple years. Currently, the default selection is to view all crashes and injury types for the year 2022. But if you want to see all fatal and serious injury crashes for 2022 and 2023, you can select those options on the left-hand side of the dashboard.
You probably also have noticed that San Antonio’s City Council districts are now overlayed on the crash map, as well. I took the redistricted council boundaries shapefile from the Open Data Portal and placed it over the crash map. Each district is its own color and you can use the left-hand menu (Below “Select Year:”) to select which districts you want to highlight. Right now, however, if you unselect all council districts, the map won’t show anything but an error. That’s something I’ll be working on fixing in a future update.
The biggest update to the map is the second tab added at the top of the dashboard – “Crash Map & Bike Facilities”. Just like the city’s council boundaries, I grabbed San Antonio’s bike facilities shapefile and overlayed that onto my crash map. The file was last updated on June 3, so it has some of the more recent bike lane additions, like the protected lane on Buena Vista, but doesn’t have the new bike lane on Fredericksburg (which I just rode on Sunday).
I think this is one of the most important maps a city can have. San Antonio is gearing up to reboot the long-dormant Bike Master Plan (since 2011!) and knowing where and what kind of bicycle accidents occur on the network is extremely important. It can inform where protected lanes should be installed or where a cycle track, fully separated from car traffic, should be in place.
Below is a screenshot of all bicycle crashes from the year 2022. Notice how many of them are on established bike lanes or bike routes…. I have a rant or two in me on bike facilities in San Antonio in general (like why is the protected bike lane on Avenue B STILL closed?) but I’ll save those for another time.
When you visit this map, it has all the same functionality of the first map, minus the council districts. You can filter by person type, crash severity and view crashes from multiple years.
I have some ideas jotted down in my idea notebook on future analysis projects, like:
- Which Council District has the most bike lanes?
- Which Council District has the most pedestrian/bicycle crashes?
- How many crashes occur at intersections?
- How many bicycle crashes are occurring on city-recognized bike lanes?
If anyone has any suggestions for improving the dashboard, let me know! And if anyone has any questions or ideas for future analyses, I’m all ears!
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