Nick Magruder is a self-described “bike mechanic turned internet mechanic” who dedicated his free time to create a tool to help people “conceptualize and ingrain the true scale of the damage traffic violence bares on our communities,” he wrote in an email to Seattle Bike Blog.
CrashMap parses data from Washington State to create an easy-to-use map of the reported deaths, serious injuries and minor injuries of people walking and biking on streets and highways. He said he aims to update the data about once a month, and he is seeking feedback on this beta version to help make it as useful as possible.
“I could never find a good place to visualize bike and pedestrian crashes in Washington, so I’ve wanted to build something like this for ages,” he wrote. “I’m between software jobs right now, so I finally had time to build it.”
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Especially when you toggle the map to give 3 years or longer and keep only the “death” and “serious injury” boxes ticked, some patterns hit you square in the face. Rainier Avenue becomes a solid line, as does Aurora. But so do some streets that are talked about less often, such as 15th Ave W/Elliott Ave W along Queen Anne and through Interbay. Stone Way, N/NW 85th Street, 1st and 4th Avenues S, and S Holgate Street. Rainier Ave is very dangerous north of Columbia City, but MLK Way is more dangerous south of Columbia City (though Rainier is still dangerous there, too).
But the best part is that this map spans the state. Seattle has pretty good data on these issues thanks to SDOT’s Vision Zero team, but the same can’t be said for every community across the state. I imagine this tool will be a huge help to neighbors trying to get something done in their smaller communities to make their local streets safer.