'Crash Map' Shows Prospect Heights Drivers Are Accident-Prone

This post was written by Megan Reisz.

Driving in Prospect Heights? Be careful behind the wheel. A new heatmap citing NYPD auto accident data shows that Prospect Heights is a hotspot for collisions.

A heat map compiled by a freelance web developer marks every instance where an auto collision has occurred in Brooklyn since August 2011.

Within the boundaries of Atlantic Avenue, Washington Avenue and Flatbush Avenue, Prospect Heights has seen about 14 injury-causing collisions, including six in Grand Army Plaza.

Created by freelance web developer John Krauss, NYC Crashmapper pinpoints locations where collisions and collisions with injuries have occurred using NYPD traffic crash data. The map also points out where pedestrians, cyclists, passengers and motorists have been injured.

“I made the map because it was nearly impossible to use the collision data as the NYPD was publishing it, both for advocates and regular people,” Krauss said. “The map is useful for advocates to demonstrate the need for safety improvements at specific intersections, for government and electeds to analyze the effects of changes they’ve made to street design (and where changes would be helpful), and for ordinary people to see possibly dangerous locations.”

Crashmapper uses data going back as far as August 2011. In order to format the NYPD’s monthly files for the map, Krauss parses, geocodes and re-processes the data, which until recently was only published in PDF format.

“I’ve done heat maps and time-sliding maps before, but it was a fun challenge to load up and visualize over 30K intersections over a significant period of time,” Krauss said. “It took a few weeks of on-and-off again work.” 

Krauss has other features planned for the map including visualization of vehicle types involved and contributing factors to accidents, such as cell phone use. 

Since the NYPD has started keeping their own archive and publishing data in Excel sheets, Krauss has published the clean, geocoded files for others to use.