This Interactive Map Shows Metro Manila’s Most Dangerous Roads
It’s often said that if you can drive in Manila, you can drive anywhere. With Manila motorists' general disregard for traffic rules, it’s no wonder we get our fair share of traffic accidents. In the name of safety, the data scientists at Thinking Machines have visualized the locations of 47,000 accidents over the past 5 years, based on information from the Department of Transformation’s Data for Road Incident Visualization Evaluation and Reporting platform (DRIVER).
This interactive map categorizes the accidents according to whether they involved pedestrians, motorcycles, taxis, jeeps, buses, bikes, trucks, tricycles, or vans.
If you click on a particular vehicle type, the map will show you the top ten danger zones for that category. The yellow dots stand for accidents that caused injuries, and the red dots represent fatal accidents.
Thinking Machines also created a map focusing on pedestrians and motorcycles, since they previously reported that “motorcycles are the most frequent vehicle involved in accidents that result in either injury or death, and that pedestrians are the most frequently killed.”
The map shows that pedestrians are most vulnerable in Marikina and Bicutan. This information helps the MMDA create policies that can reduce the number of accidents in that area in the future.
Thinking Machines has also created a map where you can zoom in and identify different accident clusters for yourself.
It’s worth noting that these maps don’t represent all the accidents that have occurred between 2012 and 2017. The government is still in the process of transferring data from the MMDA’s Metro Manila Accident Reporting and Analysis System (MMARAS)—which does not include data on longitude and latitude—to the DRIVER platform, which does. The MMARAS contains information on 914,000 accidents occurring from 2005 to the present, while as previously mentioned, DRIVER only includes crashes from 2012 to the present. Thinking Machines has provided a chart to show how the data from DRIVER and MMARAS overlap. In any case, maps based on the DRIVER platform still give a good idea of which areas are the most accident-prone.
Thinking Machines submitted these maps along with their previous data stories on vehicular accidents to the Road Safety IDEA HACK Competition. The event was a joint venture by the Department of Transportation, Grab, and World Bank. The participants were challenged to provide solutions to road safety problems using the DRIVER road platform, along with digital media and information communications technology. Happily, Thinking Machines won third place in the competition.
