Tasmanian Car Crashes Mapped

Tasmanian Crash Information provides three different mapped visualizations of ten year's worth of car crashes in the country. All three maps use data from the Tasmanian Department of State Growth with CartoDB mapping tools.

The 'Crashes Over Time' map uses the Torque library to animate the ten year's of data over time. This animated timeline feature seems to reveal an interesting drop in crashes in 2005. My knowledge of Tasmanian law isn't good enough to know whether this was due to some new road safety legislation or some other road safety measure introduced in 2005 but it seems too clear a pattern to have no clear cause.

The second map, 'Crashes Density', shows where the most road accidents have occurred. This map reveals accident hot-spots throughout the country and shows that there are far more crashes in dense urban areas than in rural areas. Obviously there is far more traffic in urban areas so this would account for the greater number of crashes. However if you zoom in on a city it is also possible to use the map to determine accident hot-spots within each urban area.

The third map, 'All Crashes with Info', plots every single crash over the ten year period. The crashes on the map are color-coded to indicate the severity of each crash. You can also select any of the markers on the map to reveal details about the severity, date and DCA report of the selected accident.