Swiss Car, Bike, and Pedestrian Crash Map – Schweizer Unfallkarte

Don’t get me wrong, this map is a great first start! While it is painful to understand that this map is a manifestation of lost lives and property, maps like this enable to turn software and data into dialogue to improve OUR STREETS.

BetaNYC’s testimony to the NYC City Council is exemplified in this map.

FIRST, if you use this map as a baseline to NYC’s crash map, it wouldn’t be possible to get down to the actual incident.

SECOND, you wouldn’t have the ability to see where on the road crashes happen.

THIRD, this data isn’t provided in realtime and must be refreshed by hand.

FOURTH, the data is “licensed” and is not available to third parties nor other developers to combine into more useful systems.

Kudos to the developers and liberators. You’ve given NYC a base point for discussion. 

About the map.

The Swiss Crashmap is based on the accident register of the federal office for roads ASTRA. It contains all the 108’640 accidents registered by the police in 2011 and 2012 involving at least one vehicle. The data was collected by the police on the ground and anonymized by ASTRA.
The overview-mode only shows the black spots. By zooming in to street-level, the details of the different accidents are revealed. The causes of the accidents are deactivated in the detail-mode for legal reasons.

The map was created by the Swiss newspapers SonntagsZeitung, Tages-Anzeiger and Le Matin Dimanche in collaboration with the Resarch Centre Sotomo of the University of Zurich. The data is licensed by ASTRA and may not be used by third parties without agreement