Jack Turek
Public Historian & Baseball Fan
recent posts
- Presidential Visits to the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers
- Analyzing the Sentiments of Declarations of Independence
- 2024 Is Still As Dangerous as Ever in San Antonio for Pedestrians & Cyclists
- So Far, 2024 Has Been Worse for Pedestrians & Cyclists in San Antonio
- Mapping Educational Gag Orders
Hi, I’m Jack! Welcome to my site. I’m a public historian interested broadly in cities, labor struggles, and baseball history.
Category: Archives
An archive of older writing and analysis.
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Navigating San Antonio without a car remains a significant challenge. City streets are not particularly safe for cyclists or pedestrians, and the lack of a connected sidewalk and bike network hinders those who wish to engage in active transportation. However, recent statistics provide a glimmer of hope for those who prefer walking and biking. In…
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On February 14, 2024, William Mize was struck and killed by a driver as he was exiting the Acequia Creek trail on his bicycle. He was 65 years old. His was the first bicyclist death of 2024. The details of the crash are sparse, but it highlights the dangers of entering and exiting the great…
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One of my favorite weekly emails comes from Data Is Plural. Each Wednesday, DIP sends out a list of several datasets of interest, either submitted by different people or found from a range of different sources (academic journals, personal GitHub repos, etc). It’s incredibly fun going through the new datasets and seeing what types of…
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On Sunday evening, I checked TxDOT’s Crash Query Tool to see if all of January’s crashes to start 2024 had been uploaded to the system. A full month’s worth of crashes were present, so I grabbed the data and began the process of updating my crash map. Everything worked seamless as usual – I filtered…
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The first weekend of the Allianz Football League is in the books and it’s time to see how my predictions did. Here they are: Kerry (2-8) v Derry (0-15) – My Elo model had this game as a toss-up, as Kerry came in with an Elo of 1635 while Derry entered with a 1633. Each…
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With the onset of the Allianz Football League, I’m back to rating & modeling the Senior County Football teams for this 2024 season. This year, I’d like to continue my ratings and predictions all the way through the All-Ireland championship, time and other commitments permitting. I previously wrote about my methodology for developing my ratings…
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2023 has come to an end and I’d like to extend everyone best wishes for the coming year! I hope your 2024 is full of happiness, fulfillment and safety for yourself and your loved ones if you decide to walk or bike here in San Antonio. The conclusion of 2023 also means that it’s been…
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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…
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I’m heading to Chicago for Thanksgiving and for most of December and while the temperature may not be conducive to biking around the city, I wanted to check out some data Chicago makes available on their bike-share program, Divvy. It’s an extremely rich dataset. Although Chicago’s Open Data Portal only covers 2013-2019, there’s over 21…
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My crash map for San Antonio is now updated with TxDOT’s latest October 2023 data and it was not a good month for pedestrians and bicyclists. 44 people (pedestrians and cyclists) were involved in some sort of vehicular incident in October. Unfortunately, 4 pedestrians and 1 bicyclists were killed last month and another 6 pedestrians…