- Nancy Huang ([email protected])
- Minh Mai ([email protected])
- David Qin ([email protected])
- Joseph Tran ([email protected])
- Clarice Wang ([email protected])
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As teens and young adults, one major milestone and accomplishment is obtaining a driver's license. Throughout the driving course, students learn how to correctly maneuver a vehicle, laws regarding right-of-way, and the safety of everyone on the road. With this in mind, we are curious to see which scenarios account for the most injuries and deaths on the road as driving a car is the most common method of transportation in the United States.
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Are collisions becoming more common as time progresses and more people are driving or does it remain the same throughout the years?
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How many people are injured and killed in traffic collisions each year in Seattle?
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What environmental factors (conditions) may have caused the incident?
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What type of collision is more common?
From our data, we can see that each year follows a similar shape of when more collisions occur. We also found that the overall number of casualties occurring from collisions has been decreasing since 2006. Finally, we found that different driving conditions, such as weather, road, or light, surprisingly did not appear to have a large effect on the number of collisions that occurred.
Looking at the yearly collision chart, we can see the large fall in the number of collisions during 2020 and early 2021, especially around March through May of 2020. This could be due to COVID beginning around these months, with lockdowns causing many people to stay at home more instead of commuting and possibly getting into collisions. Meanwhile, in the later months of 2021, the number of collisions slowly pick back up, which could follow the slow loosening of COVID restrictions.
From our data on the total number of casualties per year by severity, we noticed that there was the highest number of injuries in 2005, while the highest number of serious injuries and fatalities occurred in 2006. Though these numbers of casualties have fluctuated in the years following, they have still remained lower than those record highs in 2005 and 2006. Similar to the number of collisions themselves, the number of injuries, both serious and not, plummeted in 2020, although fatalities did not. In 2021, however, the number of serious injuries and fatalities have crept back up.
Looking at the collision data by driving conditions, we found that while a considerable number of collisions did occur during conditions that are generally thought of as more dangerous for driving, overall most of the collisions occurred during more typical driving conditions. For example, for all three conditions: weather, road, and light, the conditions with the most collisions were clear weather, dry roads, and daylight. Meanwhile, the conditions with the next most number of collisions were raining weather, wet roads, and dark roads with street lights on. For all three of these second-most common collision conditions, the number of collisions was not even half of the top most common collision conditions: the clear weather, dry roads, and daylight conditions.
Finally, we discovered that parked cars, rear-end collisions, and angles are the top three types of collisions from 2004 to 2021. We know that most crashes in Seattle are not fatal because most people are inattentive and hit parked cars since parked cars have been placed first in the majority of years. Collisions caused by rear-end collisions and angles are very common, each accounting for approximately 2000 cases per year. Other causes, such as sideswipe, left turn, pedestrian, and so on, are rare, ranging from 100 to less than 1000 cases each year.