Motorcycle Fatalities decrease by more than half in the last ten years.

Fatalities due to motorcycle accidents in BC have decreased significantly in the last decade. The fatality rate for motorcyclists, calculated by using data from the provincial department of Justice and ICBC, has dropped from its highest point in 2004 at 73 per cent to 24 per cent in 2012. The data combines the number of both motorcycle drivers and passengers who were killed in accidents.

“We’ve actually seen a significant increase in motorcycle licenses over that same time period. Between 2003 and 2012 the number of motorcycles licenses in BC has increased by 24 percent, or by 51 000 licenses, says ICBC spokesperson Leslie Dickson. “I think it’s significant that we’re seeing a recent decline even though there are many more motorcycles on the road.”

There have been 580 fatalities with involved motorcycles between 1996 and 2012. Dickson says that motorcyclists are particularly exposed when an accident happens. “Motorcyclist, like pedestrians, are vulnerable road users, so regardless of who’s at fault if there is a crash between a vehicle and a motorcyclist- it’s the non-vehicle driver who is going to be suffering more serious injuries.”

 Barry Hazard, a retired Vancouver Police officer who spent 12 years working on police motorcycle squad, says that riders increasing their visibility is key for their safely. Hazard says that even police officers didn’t start wearing reflective vests until about 15 years ago.

“More and more people wearing reflective vests when they are riding their motorcycles. You never used to see that. You’ll see more riders taking course that are insisting that [riders] wear the reflective vests while they are taking there course, which in turn makes them realize how much more observant everyone is of them. So they wear them after they get their motorcycle license."

When asked what could have contributed to the decline in motorcycle fatalities Dickson said it could be due to recent advancements in technology, such as better headlights and what a motorcyclist wears.

“One thing is helmets, helmets have improved in their design and protection- and more people are wearing proper and safer helmets. It’s also the gear that motorcyclists wear, so gear has improved significantly in the past couple decades, both the materials and the protective components that reduce injury and possibly prevent a fatal outcome”.

Hazard, who has been riding motorcycles for most of his life, also says that the amount of noise a motorcycle makes is important for a rider’s safety.

"I rode Kawasakis to begin with, because we had a split fleet- we had Kawasakis and Harley Davidsons. Kawasakis are a very quiet motorcycle. I always felt at more of a risk riding one, because if I was in somebody’s blind spot, they can’t see me and with that Kawasaki they can’t hear me either.”

Hazard says having a louder motorcycle, like a Harley Davidson, can make a difference. “You don’t have to have straight pipes like some of these guys with their race rockets have, but you don’t want to be too quiet.”

 Along with motorcycles, there has been a significant decline in car accidents overall in BC. The fatality rate (of both passengers and drivers) for car accident was at its highest in 2002 at 14 per cent. By 2012 it had dropped by more than half to six per cent.  Dickson says this could be related to the introduction of the graduated licensing program.

“We also have a graduated licensing program that for younger drivers that we introduced in [1998], hopefully that has had some impact on the decline. As we gradually let young drivers have more responsibility and give them oversight initially when they’re driving for a longer period, hopefully that has helped with [reducing] crashes.”

Data Update # 3: Explaining the decline of motorcycle fatalities

Almost at the end, and I've refined the story quite a bit. I'm now only focusing on the decrease of motorcycle fatalities.

Here is my datawrapper chart I'm using to tell this story.

  

The three best quotes I have to use in my story are from Leslie Dickson, a media relations spokesperson for ICBC.


“We’ve actually seen a significant increase in motorcycle licenses over that same time period. Between 2003 and 2012 the number of motorcycles licenses in BC has increased by 24 percent, or by 51 000 licenses. I think it’s significant that we’re seeing a recent decline even though there are many more motorcycles on the road.”

 What could have helped decrease motorcycle deaths?

“One thing is helmets, helmets have improved in their design and protection- and more people are wearing proper and safer helmets. It’s also the gear that motorcyclists wear. Gear has improved significantly in the past couple decades, both the materials and the protective components that reduce injury and possibly prevent a fatal outcome”.

 What also could have decreased vehicle fatalities in general?

 “We also have a graduated licensing program that for younger divers that we introduced in [1998], hopefully that has had some impact on the decline. As we gradually let young drivers have more responsibility and give them oversight initially when they’re driving for a longer period, hopefully that has helped with [reducing] crashes.”

 What is the one Question I can’t answer with my data? 

Though Dickson gave me some indication about the number of motorcycles on the road during the decrease between 2004 and 2012, it doesn’t show the total amount of motorcycles registered per year. Also I need the number of cars on the road per year. Dickson as my contact at ICBC has agreed to get me this data, which she says I should have before the final draft is due.

Tableau Test 2

Test number 2

Learn About Tableau

Tableau Public Test

This is my test  for tableau public visualization:

Learn About Tableau

Data Story Update #2

Chloe Smith

2014-11-09

What is my proposed lead for this story?

Car accident fatalities have drop by 49 percent between 2002 and 2012.

Despite declining fatalities in all types of motor vehicle fatalities, deaths involving motorcyclists see first significant decrease, in a decade, in 2012. 

What spreadsheet am I using to get this?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2zQCEF2bizcTDdtQnJCeXRWUlk/view?usp=sharing

Who will I talk to about this Data?

I will talk to Adam Grossman, who is the senior media relations contact for ICBC. I will also contact Ernie Dau, who is the head of the BC Coalition of Motorcyclists (BCCOM) which is an advocacy group concerned with issues relating to motorcyclists.

Comparsion of population growth in Quebec and Ontario

Ontario is growing faster than Quebec

Data Wrapper Test 3

BC 2013 Election results by riding

Datawrapper test 2

Looking at percentage of female MLAs

First Datawrpper Chart

A test post for my first Datawrapper chart:

Data Story Update # 1

I’ve decide to based my story off five different data sets examining trends in motor vehicle fatalities in BC.

These data sets are available on the provincial government’s open data portal, and examine fatalities by region, gender, accident type, involvement of alcohol and drugs, and what month the accidents occurred. All the sets cover data from 1996 to 2012. 

I believe this will be a good basis for a news story because at a first glance the data seems to show a decline overall for fatalities in car accidents, but with that decrease there are an increases of individual trend as well (number of motorcycle deaths for example). Asking an expert about variation in certain trends may prove useful, but also finding a more human element to the story should be important. 

As far as the actual data is structured it is fairly straight forward, however how some of the criteria are formatted by year will be tricky to tidy up. 

Questions I would like to answer this data:

How has motor vehicle fatalities increase or decreased? What year had the most fatalities and which year has the least?

What region has the most fatalities? Which region has the least? What region has decreased the most? Which has increased the most?

Which gender has the most fatalities? How has that changed over time?

Which months have the most and least fatalities? How has that change over time?

Data Analysis: Driving and Gender Politics

[Edited after graded]
[Apperently the link provided to the orignal article is no longer working at all- apologies for the incoinvenance]

How to settle arguments about gender politics while having dinner with your relatives- statistic based reporting.

Ridiculous Facebook arguments can lead you in useful directions. In response to an off color joke by family member about women drivers, I looked into whether anyone had compelled any comparative data about gender and driving.

 An editorial piece, written by Chuck Tannert for MSN Autos, entitled “Who Are Better Drivers: Men or Women?” attempts to settle the tired social debate over which sex is better behind the wheel. I decided to analyse not only because of my own personal curiosity, but also stories leading to discussions of feminism have been popping up in the news more and more frequently.

I also think it would interesting, if doing this story for BC, to break the data up by different areas of BC, because there is bound to be some variation in the results given a larger more specific sample.

Overall I believe the data is explain in the article quite clearly. Compiling the ratios between men and women committing different traffic violations, as well as the overall fatal crash rates broken up by age and gender show the reader how the reporter came to that conculsion. However, this is some issues with the exact dating of the data. The story itself has no date of publication and the fatal crash graph time frame is cut off by an ad on the site.  

Also the quality of the data is questionable considering that part come from a third party study by a group called Quality Planning, i think it would be better to have used a source more official, in this case since it's an American story that would be the Department of Motor Vehicles.  

I do think where the piece fails to convey the data effectively is in the presentation. The table relating fatal crash data is clunky and crowded. It would be easy for a reader to skim over it without absorbing the information provided. If I were to solve this problem, I think it would be more effective to have an interactive tool that would allow reader to input, for example, an age group and then be presented with a comparison that was more visually appealing.

If this piece was to be replicated for BC drivers I would suggest using ICBC as a data source. Any ticket and record of violation do go through them, and they are universal to all parts of the province- dealing with them would be less complicated than individual police forces.

I also make this suggestion because other sources, such as Cansim and StatCan only provide this data on a national scale.

There may be some restrictions applied to getting this data, but if only provided with age, gender, type of violation, and number of accidents (fatal and non-fatal), the journalist working on this story could do so without infringing on anyone’s privacy.

Overall I believe doing a similar story could be very useful to BC readers, but also I think it could be done more effectively than this particular piece.