Boston is undertaking a bevy of initiatives aimed at making the city’s policies and infrastructure more accommodating to the safety needs of bikers. And while everybody and their mother is excited for the prospect, what happens when you feel like crossing the Charles and cycling around Cambridge? The MIT Media Lab is contributing to this protection movement in the form of a new interactive map.
The Media Lab’s Social Computing Group constructed a map of Cambridge featuring the locations of the city’s 746 bicycle crashes from 2010 through 2013. The map is just one aspect of You Are Here, a multifaceted project for which those in the Media Lab are creating various maps of cities they’ve traveled and charting their favorite experiences. You can read about You Are Here in more detail right here.
“Each of these maps will be an aggregation of thousands of microstories, tracing the narratives of our collective experience,” the You Are Here website reads. “We will make maps of the little things that make up life — from the trees we hug, to the places where we crashed our bikes, to the benches where we fell in love.”
The Media Lab pulled its bike crash data from the Cambridge Police Department Bicycle Accident Reports and plotted each accident using the Google Maps Geolocation API in order to pinpoint exactly where each reported accident occurred.
It’s important to remember, too, that not every single bike accident was reported to the authorities. It’s unclear what the actual total is, and the Media Lab based its map on those that were reported officially.
Using an average-link agglomerative clustering algorithm, they were able to create clusters representative of where most accidents took place. The larger the cluster, the more accident-prone the location.
Anyone using the map can then choose three options for viewing specific locations. City view allows the user to view the map with every accident available at the same time. Location view pulls up Google Maps’s street view. If the user hovers over a particular hotspot on the map, the street view will then pull up a photo of the respective location. Street view essentially breaksdown accidents on a location by location basis. Want to view the accidents that happened on just on Massachusetts Ave.? Street view affords that luxury.
Users can also compare Cambridge’s bike crash map to ones for Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, Austin and all five New York City boroughs. Cambridge is by far the smallest of the cities in terms of both population and square milage, and its number of accidents over a span of four years reflects that.
You Are Here’s other topics include coffee shops in six various cities, street greenery in five cities and number of permanent visa applications for eight cities.
The Media Lab promises on its homepage to issue a new map every single day and grow its arsenal of cities to over 100. Just be glad they’re not making apps that let you stalk a stranger for 20 days. Oh wait…
