Re:Every death on every road in Great Britain 1999-2010
by barrkel on Monday December 05, 2011 @08:47AM
(#3314539)
I've ridden motorbikes a few times on some narrow country roads in the UK - when creating a route for a GPS, it's not always apparent how wide the road is going to end up being.
And as a result, several times I've had to ride almost into the ditch, as I come around a corner cautiously at about 20mph (national speed limit road) and am faced with a 4x4 doing 40mph, who only notices me at the last second and makes a disturbingly exaggerated swerve away from me. To the point that now, when I see my route is going down what looks to be a narrow road, I just find a different path.
And that's where my other problem with interpreting these visualizations comes from: they'd be hugely more useful if there was some way of normalizing them with respect to journey count. Then you'd know whether the road has a high rate owing to being dangerous, or simply has a lot of traffic and may actually be safer than average.
For this purpose, the variant of the map that includes serious and slight injuries would be more useful - http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2011/nov... - but keep the individual incidents "smeared out", as it were, and modulate somehow with the amount of traffic.
And as a result, several times I've had to ride almost into the ditch, as I come around a corner cautiously at about 20mph (national speed limit road) and am faced with a 4x4 doing 40mph, who only notices me at the last second and makes a disturbingly exaggerated swerve away from me. To the point that now, when I see my route is going down what looks to be a narrow road, I just find a different path.
And that's where my other problem with interpreting these visualizations comes from: they'd be hugely more useful if there was some way of normalizing them with respect to journey count. Then you'd know whether the road has a high rate owing to being dangerous, or simply has a lot of traffic and may actually be safer than average.
For this purpose, the variant of the map that includes serious and slight injuries would be more useful - http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2011/nov... - but keep the individual incidents "smeared out", as it were, and modulate somehow with the amount of traffic.