With all of the driving I do in the city, I wondered how I can improve my odds of avoiding accidents, everything from small collisions to serious accidents, and safely reach my destination. If you are in the same boat (even if you take taxis on a regular basis), you may be interested in this post.
Using data from NY's Open Data website, I analyzed all reported motor vehicle collisions in NYC during 2014. Because time and location data (in the form of longitude/latitude coordinates) was available for each accident, I was able to create a series to diagrams and heat maps to help answer the core questions of avoiding vehicle accidents, specifically: (1) what areas should you avoid while driving, and (2) what times of day should you avoid while driving? There were about 173,000 reported vehicle collisions in NYC last year, let's see what the data reveals.
Where to not Drive
To start, below is heat map of those 173,000 collisions in NYC (we'll zoom in on specific areas in a moment). The green areas have few collisions, the red areas have many collisions (over 50 a year). Coming as no surprise, Manhattan's midtown area has the highest concentration of accidents. However, you can also see that major highways in Brooklyn and Queens sustain regular accidents (again, not a surprise).
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| Heat Map of Vehicle Collisions in NYC, 2014 (Red = Highest Concentration of Collisions) |
If we zoom in on Manhattan and the surrounding borough areas, we have the below heat map. I have indicated areas where accidents are most prevalent.
Midtown Manhattan (running from ~34th St to ~59th St) is not only the busiest area of NYC, it also is fraught with construction, so it's no surprise accidents are heavily concentrated here. Delancy Street and Canal Street are the major roads leading to major bridges, namely the Williamsburg Bridge and Manhattan Bridge. In addition, heading west, Canal St. is the major throughfare to the Holland Tunnel to NJ. These two roads have to accommodate a lot of traffic as a result. Rounding out the accident-prone areas of NYC is the Barclay's center in Brooklyn, at the intersections of two major roads: Atlantic Avenue and Flatbush Avenue. It might be hard to avoid these areas due to their centrality but we'll also discuss how timing plays a role when driving.
The Worst Place to Drive
Is there a specific area in NYC that has the highest concentration of collisions per year? In fact, there is. It is in midtown Manhattan (east side), and it's where the Queensboro Bridge enters the city at 60th Street & 2nd Avenue. This areas sustains over 275 collisions a year! That's about one collision every 32hrs. Craziness. Is there something about this bridge and 2nd Ave that leads to this staggering statistic? I think so. Check out how the bridge enters the city: it essentially comes to a T-intersection with 2nd Ave and the surrounding side streets. Imagine trying to navigate this:
And that T-intersection I was talking about? Here's a street view of the area. As you can see, approaching from the bridge, if you inch out even a little bit on 2nd Ave, you're going to be hit.
The Queensboro Bridge is also a heavily used bridge because there's no toll for crossing it, which probably adds to the concentration of accidents in this area.
When to Not Drive
Avoiding the above-mentioned 'hot spots' makes sense but this recommendation probably doesn't need to be heeded all day. What are the best / worst times to drive in NYC? Using the same data set mentioned above, I created the following histogram, which shows how many collisions occurred in 2014 at different times of day.
Not surprising, most collisions occur during rush hour - but using the above chart as a proxy, rush 'hour' happens to be a rush day, occurring from ~8:00AM to ~7:00PM when accidents are at daily highs. Ouch. To decrease your chances of collision, you'll have to leave / enter NYC before 8:00AM, or after 7:00PM. That kind of sucks but at least you know when your chances of being in a collision increase / decrease.
There are also a few interesting side-notes worth mentioning about the above histogram:
- You can see there is a slight up-tick in accidents in the early hours (around midnight to 2:00AM). This is likely due to party-goers driving themselves home or taking a taxi home.
- You'll notice a very sharp decrease in the number of collisions in the middle of rush hour (around 4:00PM)! My guess for this nearly 3,000 accident daily drop occurs because of taxi shift changes. In NYC, taxis are driven by two drivers, each on duty for a 12hr shift. To make each driver's shift equally attractive, the high demand time of day is split between the two people, the split occurring at peak demand time. Unfortunately, the first driver has to hand off the taxi to the second driver in Queens (where most taxi depots are located), resulting in a massive taxi decrease in the city. This NY Times article explains this further.
Driving on The Weekends
Breaking down collisions by day of the week, we obtain the below histogram (which is a little hard to read at first):
You can see two interesting things:
You can see two interesting things:
- Saturday and Sunday experience about 30% fewer collisions than any other weekday
- (Likely) due to Saturday night party goers, late-night collisions peak late Saturday / early Sunday (i.e. at least double the number of collisions in comparison to any other weekday).
Recommendations
Using the above heat maps and historgrams, you should:
- Avoid Midtown (especially the Queensboro Bridge) and Lower Manhattan (Delancey / Canal St.) by using other entries into the city, or (even better) by using the subway
- If you have to drive into / out of the city via the 'hot spots' do so before 8:00AM or after 7:00PM to lower your chances of accident
- Drive into / out of the city at any time during the weekends (but be aware of driving late at night: there are more collisions at this time, and you'll likely be tired as well)
Other than these recommendations, using the data, we can also conclude that the number of accidents increases as there are more vehicles on the road. However, with the help of some informative data analysis, maybe we can break this trend. Drive safely!
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SAS was used for this analysis; code is available upon request
heatmaps generated using QGIS
Source of data from NY's Open Data website
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