Last Saturday was Open Data Day & I went to the event here in Vancouver where I was lucky enough to get my hands on some pretty interesting data, courtesy of David Eaves. Five years of bike accident data sourced from the provincial insurer her in BC.
The data wasn’t very detailed – just month/year & lat/lons but there was enough there to be able to slap together a quick viz in geocommons mapping out all the accidents in Vancouver between 2006-2010. Each dot represents an accident, colour-coded by year.
The five-year totals were aggregated under local election-riding boundaries (which isn’t necessarily the most valuable marker but was certainly the quickest to pull down!) and made into a heatmap layer. We added another layer with all Vancouver’s bike routes.
As a viz, not great, but it wasn’t bad for a day that involved delicious food courtesy of Food Tree & chat with the provincial MLA responsible for open data. The bike accident data – perhaps unsurprisingly for Vancouver – was a popular item & it was a lot of fun to hack around with lots of interesting people to see what we could make of the data.
I think there’s a fair bit more to be done with the data & I’m looking forward to working more with it – including trying to get more detailed data out of ICBC!