Exploring Data in San Diego

For this assignment, I decided to pose the following question to the San Diego Regional Data Library: “What area of San Diego has the greatest number of car accidents?” I am interested in this subject because I am currently working on a large investigative project for my internship, and one aspect of the project involves car accidents in a specific neighborhood of San Diego County. My question as answered by Eric, who first suggested that I look at  University of California, Berkeley’s “Transportation Injury Mapping System” website. The data that TIMS data analysts use to create their maps comes from the California Highway Patrol’s Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System. There are sometimes delays in this system, especially if the traffic collision resulted in a death (as Eric stated in his response), so it would be difficult to specifically say that any one neighborhood is more or less dangerous than another.

After signing up for an account, I was able to choose a time frame and look at all collisions that occurred either on city streets or state routes in the state of California. I specifically looked at accidents on city streets in the City of San Diego, as needed for my project, and I was able to find accidents that occurred at the intersection that I am interested in studying. While I cannot disclose exactly how I am interested in using this data in the specific story that I am working on, one other way that this data could be used could be to show areas of San Diego that are particularly dangerous. The article could look at the reasons why there are so many accidents, and possible alternative solutions to controlling traffic and preventing accidents on specific roadways. One example of a similar news story is seen in an investigative piece published by the Houston Chronicle.