Happy December, everyone! Christmas has come early for those of you interested in pedestrian & cyclist safety in San Antonio. Unfortunately, many car drivers will still be getting lumps of coal from Santa this year.
I’ve made some pretty significant updates to my Pedestrian & Cyclist Crash map. The updates are mostly related to the lay-out and some additional information I’ve added, which I’ll walk through below. I’ve removed some features, but I plan to add in more features over the coming months, as well.
First off, the layout of the dashboard has changed quite a bit. I’ve added a new menu sidebar with a couple different options for you to choose from. The home page of the dashboard is now a description of the project – a little background on San Antonio’s Vision Zero plan, where I think it falls short, why I decided to create my own dashboard, a description of the different maps, and where I got the data from.
Below the home page on the sidebar menu is where you can pick which maps you want to view. The first map option is the crash map with San Antonio’s City Council districts included. This map shows both pedestrians (green circles) and cyclists (blue cyclists). Clicking on a circle will bring up information on the crash like injury severity and date. You can still filter the crashes on this map by “Injury Severity”, “Person Type”, and by Year. For now, I’ve removed the option to select which council districts appear on the map. Once I make some adjustments to my data and link the council districts to each crash’s location I plan to add that feature back into the dashboard.
The second map option shows San Antonio’s bike routes and all crashes involving cyclists. Previously, this map showed pedestrian-involved crashes, as well, but since a main feature of the map are the bike lanes I decided to only include cyclist-involved crashes. You can still filter by “Injury Severity” and Year in this map.
Another feature that I’ve removed for the time being are the demographic tables. I do plan to add those back as a new tab in the next couple of months, but I wasn’t too happy with their presentation in the dashboard. Once I fix the layout and some of the data values, I’ll add those tables back in since I think they provide valuable context and information.
The next sections provide some deeper background on the data and program I use to create the dashboard. The “Data Description” section details where I obtain the crash data, San Antonio’s city council boundaries, and the bike routes currently present in San Antonio. The “Technical Notes” section provides some more detail about how I build and maintain the dashboard using R. I’m working on a longer and more detailed write-up of my code and script which I’ll post in the future.
And finally, the “About Me” section has a little more detail about…me!
The last two sections are very new. I currently host my dashboard on Google Cloud, which isn’t free. If the spirit moves you, I’ve set up a “Buy Me a Pizza” account in case you’d like to donate and help offset some server costs. I’m using the site “Buy Me a Coffee”, but since they have a pizza option and I consider myself a pizza aficionado, I chose that option.
The last section gives an opportunity for you, the user, to provide feedback on the dashboard. If you see an issue, an error, or want something added to the dashboard, fill out the survey and I’ll get an email with your comment!
As I mentioned above, the data used in the dashboard will continue to be updated monthly and I’ll likely add new features to the dashboard periodically between data updates.
As always, if anyone has any comments, suggestions, or would like to work on the project, get in tough!
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