Where Cars Kill

Every year tens of thousands of people are hit by cars in New York. The New Yorker has released an interactive map which allows you to see where cars have injured pedestrians or cyclists between 2013 and 2021.

Enter a New York zip-code into the When Cars Kill map and you can view the locations of all the car crashes in that neighborhood that resulted in injuries.The map uses data from the New York Police Department to show where the most dangerous accident hot-spots were between 2013 and 2021.Crashes that occurred between intersections are aggregated to the nearest one. Over half of New York City pedestrians killed were hit at an intersection.

curb extensions - one of the many possible road safety features which can reduce injuries from cars

The New Yorker's article When Cars Kill also includes a number of graphical illustrations of road design safety measures which could be introduced to reduce the number of pedestrians and cyclists injured and killed by cars. These include curb extensions (to give pedestrians more space), speed bumps, s-curve chicanes (to slow cars), protected bike lanes, and safety islands (dividing crossings into shorter intervals).

If you want to map traffic accidents in New York for yourself then you can use the NYPD Motor Vehicle Collisions data from NYC Open Data. In this data all collisions are geocoded with a longitude and latitude (to the nearest intersection). The data also includes the time of day of each incident (a factor not used in the New Yorker map).

The time of day data is used in the Visions Zero View interactive map of New York City traffic crashes. This map also visualizes 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 graph showing the number of crashes by time of day. This graph is interactive, which means you can click on a time of day to view where accidents in the city occurred during the selected hours. 

The 'Street Design' view allows users to explore some of the Vision Zero initiatives which have been introduced on the city's streets, such as arterial slow zones, speed humps and other major safety projects designed to increase traffic safety in the city of New York.