How safe is your ride route?
Free program allows motorists, motorcyclists, cyclists and pedestrians to gauge danger levels of travel routes, using historical data gathered over five yearsIt's a typical morning, you set off to work in the car, motorcycle via foot, or on a bicycle, and traffic seems unusually heavy. So you take a different route.
But is it the safest route?
In the last five years, a short 3km commute to the Carsales.com Ltd office in Richmond (Vic) saw 80 crashes, 77.5 per cent of which involved vehicles.
We know this because of a new web-based application called TripRisk, which makes it easy for Victorian motorists, motorcyclists, pedestrians and cyclists to assess the danger of any given route.
By using historical data from state authority VicRoads, gathered between July 2007 and June 2012, TripRisk presents the (colossal) amounts of data quickly and in an easy to understand format.
Simply click start and end points on an interactive map, of any given route -- whether to work or cross country -- and TripRisk tells you how many accidents there have been along the route, whether they involved cars, bikes (powered and non-powered) or pedestrians and whether there was a fatality.
Crashes and fatalities are represented by coloured dots on the map, and are context sensitive so you can more closely analyse specific intersections and black spots.
The data is presented in a simple manner and shows which days of the week saw the most accidents – Fridays seem to be particularly risky – which times of day are statistically riskier and which age groups were involved in the collisions.
Created by a company called Geoplex, the TripRisk application takes open data that is freely available, and makes it exceedingly accessible.
TripRisk rightly explains that the statistics on road-related crashes are "hard to grasp".
"Looking at the data within the context of the journeys we make everyday helps us to understand that these crashes are closer to our day to day lives than we first might think," says Geoplex.
Although the program is only Victorian-based at present, it wouldn't be hard for other road authorities such as the RTA in New South Wales to provide historical crash statistics.
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