The Ultimate Map of New York's Mean Streets

You don’t need fancy data visualizations to know that walking on the streets of New York can be a scary experience. True, the city is by many measures the nation’s best walking town, with fewer car owners by far than any other American city. Nonetheless, a lot of drivers in New York seem to think that might makes right—intimidating their way through crosswalks, blowing through stop signs, and blasting down major boulevards at top speed.

Opaque reporting methods used to make it hard to get a handle on just how bad the streets are. But New York’s open-data law went into effect in 2013, putting a wealth of municipal information online in a format easily accessible to developers. Now, it’s possible to map just how hazardous the city’s streets are for pedestrians using the NYPD’s numbers.