Via Citylab, here’s an interactive map showing all the deaths on roads for the entire country for a decade. A data researcher named Max Galka made it, and it has over 370,000 data points, one for each fatality. Wow.
I zoomed in on Central Minnesota here. Duluth and Lake Superior are at the top right. You can play around with the whole thing online, and the data is color-coded and icon’d to match type of death.
For example, here’s zooming in on the Twin Cities.
Can you find Snelling or Franklin? Spot the freeways?
I know there’s been resistance/obstruction in the past by MnDOT to release (public) data around collisions/injuries/fatalities per functional classification or roadway type. Maybe this is a good workaround. Hood?
That wouldn’t be MnDOT. That’d be DPS (Department of Public Safety). They’re the state entity that complies crash data.
That said, MnDOT’s Office of State Aid has a partial breakdown for 2007-2011 crashes by county for trunk highways and county routes: http://www.dot.state.mn.us/stateaid/trafficsafety.html
According to the page for MnDOT’s Crash Mapping Analysis Tool, it’s DPS data, but MnDOT is the agency restricting access.
http://www.dot.state.mn.us/stateaid/crashmapping.html
“The Mn/DOT Division, State Aid for Local Transportation (SALT) requires, that prior to receiving access to the Minnesota Crash Mapping Analysis Tool (MnCMAT), notification and approval for release must be granted to the requesting Agency by the County or City Engineer within that Agency’s legal jurisdiction.”
Operating on limited data here (pun intended), but it’s possible that MnDOT is restricting access because of DPS. It should also be noted that, per the access paragraph you posted, access is granted by the county or city engineer for a given jurisdiction…engineers who are outside of MnDOT’s organization.
Yep, this is what I was referring to. Thanks for providing the link. From what I’ve heard in the past, it’s ripe for a lawsuit if anyone wants it. I’m guessing the data are classified as public, or a lightly-scrubbed version would be public. It seems that they are obstructing access to the data by putting it within a tool, then limiting access to the tool. Nothing wrong with the tool, but they should also be providing a consumable dataset to the public.