Automobile Crash Incidence

Even though this might not seem to be the case, automobile crashes are relatively rare, especially considering how much we drive in America. In 2021, we logged more than three trillion miles driven. In the same year, there were roughly six million police-reported crashes, meaning that, on average, you could drive 500,000 miles before getting in a wreck. However, some situations and some roads are more dangerous than others. We were interested in which roads in El Paso have tended to have more crashes in the recent past. In this case, we wanted to focus on drivers within the city, rather than passing through, so we excluded highways and freeways. Not all crashes are the same, so we weighted the count of crashes by the severity of each (more information on that process in the Data & Methodology section). In the map below, each neighborhood road and arterial is color coded based on how many crashes were reported there.

If you zoom in on the map, more roads and streets appear, and you can see that several roads have no color at all. This signifies that there were no crashes reported on that road for the time period we evaluated (2018 - 2022). Looking at the roads with a higher number of crashes, there are several that include busy intersections, such as Edgemere and Yarborough, or freeway interchanges, such as North Mesa and I-10. There is a concentration of more dangerous streets downtown, likely due to the higher number of pedestrians in the area. Looking at the roads where you drive or close to where you live, does this map line up with your experience?

Data on automobile crashes is provided by the  Texas Department of Transportation Crash Records Information System (CRIS) . We pulled the data for all reported accidents from 2018 to 2022, the exact location of the accident, and the severity of the accident. Accident severity is determined by observed injury type, so that each accident is assigned one of six possible classifications: ‘Fatal,’ ‘Serious,’ ‘Minor,’ ‘Possible,’ ‘None,’ or ‘Unknown.’ (For our purposes, accidents with an ‘Unknown’ classification were grouped together with ‘Possible’). We weighted the number of crashes by the severity of each. The weights are based on the  USDOT Federal Highway Administration’s estimates of the comprehensive crash cost for each injury type . Lastly, we normalized the weighted count of crashes by the length of the segment of road.

 Check out the data for yourself .