New York Traffic Accidents

The objective was to present a report / dashboard which highlighted any trends & patterns in the occurrence of New York's traffic accidents.

The dataset contained all the traffic accidents in New York City from Jan'21 up to Aug'22. Each record represented a vehicle collision, and included details about the date, time, location, vehicle type, contributing factor and if injury or death occurred.

Key Questions:

• Do traffic accidents show any seasonal patterns?
• During which time of day & day of week do traffic accidents occur most frequently?
• Are there any particular streets or intersections that carry a higher risk than others?
• What are the most common contributing factors for traffic accidents? What about the most fatal?

Key Insights:

• Accidents occurred most frequently between 2 - 6pm, on Fridays and between May - Oct.
• Driver Inattention caused the most accidents and Unsafe driving led to the most deaths.
• Violation of Safe Driving practises as a group led to the highest accident and death counts.
• Belt Parkway was the most accident prone street.

Visualisation:

I chose a heat map to visualise the trends in day and time, as it provided quick and clear identification of the peak accident periods. For seasonality, I used column charts so you could easily compare months.

I grouped contributing factors by common theme to be actionable as accident awareness. The groups were presented as a scrollable bar chart, with the top 5 contributing factors of that group listed below the chart as a list.

Due to the inconsistencies in the location data, I chose to present this as top 5 list instead of a map with some key insights narrative alongside.