New York Safety Maps

In 2014 New York lowered the speed limit for cars to 25 mph. Walk Safe NYC has examined the number of pedestrian accidents for Jan to March for this year and for the same months in 2014. The data shows that the policy has already reduced the number of pedestrian accidents in all five boroughs.

Walk Safe NYC has also released an interactive map showing the most hazardous intersections for pedestrians in the city. The map shows the most hazardous intersections from this year's data and allows you to compare the results with the data for 2012, 2013 and 2014.


New York has set a 'Vision Zero' goal, to end traffic accident deaths and injuries on the city's roads. To help achieve this aim the City of New York has released a map, Vision Zero View, which shows detailed information on traffic injury and fatality crashes within New York.

The map has two main views; a visualization of New York's traffic accidents and a visualization of the city's attempts to make the streets safer. The 'Crashes' view allows users to visualize the locations of pedestrian,cycling and car injuries and fatalities. This map view includes a timeline which allows you to filter the results shown on the map by year.


To explore New York's traffic crash data in detail you can use NYC Crashmapper. This map visualizes New York intersection collision data between August 2011 and February 2014.

Using the filter buttons on the right of the map you can view heat maps of collisions involving pedestrian, cyclist or car driver injuries. You can also use the slide control at the bottom of the map to filter the results shown by date.

If you click on an intersection on the map you can view a detailed breakdown of the type of collisions that occurred there.


MIT has released a number of maps showing areas of perceived safety in New York, Boston, Chicago and Detroit. Using Street View images of the cities StreetScore assesses the perceived safety of locations throughout the city. Green dots on the map represent the areas which StreetScore has assigned as having a high perceived safety rating and the red dots are the locations with a low perceived rating score.

One thing missing from the MIT StreetScore maps is the ability to filter the results shown on the map by score. However MIT has made the data available for download so I decided to make my own map of New York and add some filters.

In this Safe New York map I've taken the data for Manhattan, New York. The map shows the safest and least safe locations as perceived by the MIT Street View algorithm. The MIT q-score assigns a value up to 43 for each Street View image. The higher the q-score assigned the higher the safety perception. The lower the q-score the lower the safety perception.

I've marked every location which has a score under 15 with a red marker and every location with a score over 30 with a green marker. All locations with a score between 15 and 30 are displayed with a yellow marker.