Mapping New York's Traffic Crashes

The New York Police Department doesn't make it easy to crunch the city's traffic fatality and injury numbers, releasing the data in a PDF format that's difficult for developers to use. A group called betaNYC has been pushing the cops to make their data machine-readable, and new mayor Bill de Blasio's Vision Zero plan might help their case.

In the meantime, it's up to some hard-working data nerds to liberate the information locked inside the files. One civic-minded hacker named John Krauss has been scraping the data from the monthly PDF releases and making it available to anyone on the NYPD Crash Data Band-Aid. Krauss runs a site called NYC Crashmapper, where you can play around with a map that displays crashes by date, what type of user was involved, and severity of crash.