Chapter 1 Introduction

According to New York State’s Department of Health, motor vehicle traffic crashes are one of the leading causes of injury related death or hospitalization for residents of New York City. Other than homicides, the fatal incidents in which NYPD has the most contact with the public are fatal traffic collisions. An alarming fact is that traffic is the top injury-related cause of death of children in NYC. Thus it is imperative to analyse all the data available on motor vehicle collisions in NYC in order to draw helpful insights to curb the number of fatalities.

Through this project, our goal is to answer the following questions with the help of Exploratory Data Analysis and Visualization:

  • What time slots see the most accidents? Medical Services and the NYPD could be more vigilant at this time.
  • Which months see the most number of accidents
  • What days see the most number of accidents?
  • Which localities are the most accident prone?
  • How do the boroughs with the most and least accidents compare?
  • Can we observe the zip codes with the most accidents on a map?
  • What does the accident density over NY look like?
  • What are leading contributors to accidents in accident-prone areas? Also, which of these factors would lead to the most fatal accidents?
  • What vehicle types are involved in the maximum number of fatal accidents?
  • Which neighborhoods have improved or deteriorated the most?

We hope that such visualizations would enable us to draw inferences that will help reduce collisions on the road.