This feature shows a map of Motor Vehicle Collisions in NYC as registered by the NYPD. Each marker on the map represents a single collision that resulted in an injury or fatality. By clicking on a marker, an info window appears with the time of the collision along with information on vehicle type(s), injuries, and fatalities. The data comes from NYC OpenData and is pulled from a live dataset, which the NYPD updates every weekday. It contains all accidents going back to July 1, 2012. With growing emphasis on pedestrian and cyclist safety with the Vision Zero initiative, I hope this will be a useful tool for accessing accident data. The visualization is designed to include the live updates on NYC Open Data, in addition to all accidents over the last three years.
This page accesses the live data in the json format. The url query allows SQL-like commands to specify the JSON objects where the number of injuries or fatalities for a paricular accident is greater than zero. Given the volume of motor vehicle accidents in NYC, I decided to implement the Marker Clusterer in the Google Maps API. This feature will aggregate markers in each region and display the number of markers in each. Upon clicking a Cluster marker, the map will zoom in any either show individual pins or recalculate and show the distribution of sub-clusters in each area. This is a very useful tool to visualize the number of accidents, particularly in high-traffic neighborhoods.
Users can click on individual markers to see the details of each accident, including: time, date, number or injuries or fatalities, and type of vehicle involved.