More about missing Hit and Runs

I find any hit-and-run abhorrent. A hit-and-run driver involved in any traffic crash with any injury is a criminal felon; and if the injury is serious or results in death, it’s a serious felony (class 3 or 2). It’s worth pointing out that hit-and-run is a crime for the driver regardless of who caused the crash (i.e. which party had the right of way is irrelevant, except for sentencing).

The background is I noticed here and there over the years what seemed to me to be an odd listing in the traffic database of a fatal bicyclist, and an unknown vehicle with unknown everything else (direction, lane, lighting, etc etc) except for bicyclist demographic and it usually had a location, but was NOT listed as a hit-and-run. I inquired about a few of them and the story was always something like the coroner(I think?) submitted something somehow to traffic records. I brushed it off as something that happens very rarely; some sort of freak occurrence. However. It turns out there are dozens of such cases every year., unsurprisingly most of them are pedestrian. Continue reading “More about missing Hit and Runs”

2022 Preliminary Arizona Traffic Crash Stats

[UPDATE: yes, this is wrong wrong wrong. 2022 was in fact a terrible, bad, worse year; see Arizona Crash Facts 2022 ]

This is a warning about preliminary data and drawing stats from it… there was a news article “Arizona traffic fatalities are down in 2022, data shows” that was suggesting that 2022 might be on-track for significantly fewer traffic fatalities:

After a deadlier than usual year for traffic deaths in 2021, fatalities in 2022 showed a sharp decrease, according to preliminary data from the Arizona Governor’s Office of Highway Safety.
According to the preliminary data from the office, traffic fatalities between January and June fell from 626 deaths in 2021 to 350 deaths in 2022 — a 44% decrease.

Sadly, this is unlikely to be true. Continue reading “2022 Preliminary Arizona Traffic Crash Stats”

Woman, 19, pushing disabled car struck, killed in Phoenix

Note to self to follow up to see how this gets coded in asdm and fars. Conceptually, a pedestrian was killed in a rear-end collision, a collision a driver should have been easily able to avoid if the struck vehicle had lights/flashers (it was at night). Was the disabled vehicle displaying emergency lights, or otherwise lit?

Phoenix file number?

Who is most at fault? For comparison, who is most at fault in the rear-end collision pictured here, the pickup driver or the school bus driver — the Pickup driver rammed a stopped school bus?

Continue reading “Woman, 19, pushing disabled car struck, killed in Phoenix”

Missing 2013 and 2014 Fatalities

A note about data sources

  • FARS. As of this writing the 2013 final is available, and 2014 is preliminary
  • Arizona Crash Facts; published yearly by ADOT in June of the following year
  • ADOT collision database sometimes called ASDM (I’ll refer to it as that, below); released yearly in June of the following year
  • News / Media reports; obviously this is very incomplete and hit-and-miss

Data from all these sources is located centrally on this google docs spreadsheet. which covers each bicyclist fatality occurring from 2009 onward.

Normally these are all in agreement, however there are multiple inconsistencies in both 2013 and 2014 that I cannot resolve. Continue reading “Missing 2013 and 2014 Fatalities”

MMUCC C9 Manner of Crash

Executive Summary: You may have never heard of the MMUCC (Model Minimum Uniform Crash Criteria; a set of federal guidelines), it trickles down into every state’s motor vehicle crash reporting system. It’s somewhat analogous to the relationship between the UVC and state’s vehicle codes. The problem, I should say one problem, is non-motorists tend to get overlooked. One obvious example is delved into here — the “Manner of Crash”, e.g. angle, rear-end, sideswipe, etc. is ONLY defined when it involves two motor vehicles, leaving that data-field undefined when a crash is between a MV and bicyclist. Since bicyclists are vehicle drivers, the MMUCC should reflect that. Read on for a proposed change that’s on the table, and how you can vote/comment officially: Continue reading “MMUCC C9 Manner of Crash”

Use of alcohol as a risk factor for bicycling injury

Skip below if you’ve visited this page specifically to see the Johns Hopkins’ study.

FARS Alcohol Results

The FARS data has a number of alcohol (and drug) fields — the fields ATST_TYP, ALC_RES relate actual test type, and results. To simplify things, I’ve added a derived field sALC_RES to breaks down test results into: negative, .01 through .07, and .08+, or no results. Most fatally injured drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians do get tested. (for those that are not, there are imputed results available from a separate data file, see below).

Note that the ALC_RES field, the numerical result, has changed over the years, before 2015, it was listed as the number of hundredths of a percent BAC, e.g. 0.12 was coded as 12. In 2015 and later, it is coded as thousandths of a percent BAC, so the same result would be listed at 120.  The logic for this is encapsulated in the file 20xx_person.sql in the synthetic value sALC_RES: intox / not intox.

FARS and Drug Testing

The coding for drug results in FARS is similar to the alcohol scheme, except there are no quantitative results, only positive/negative. Also there is no equivalent to the imputation of results for drugs.

FARS coding: positive results for drugs shows up in the field DSTATUS=2 (i.e. “test given”) and DRUGRES1, 2, or 3 have a number up to 999; all in the person table. 0 meand test not given; 1 means No Drugs Reported/Negative. Potentially illicits are in groups generally in hundreds, e.g. 100-295 are narcotics, 300’s are depressants, 600’s cannaboids.  Anything 996 or above are various meanings for unknown.

Examples: Zolpidem (Ambien) is 375. See pages 579-594 of the FARS Coding and Validation Manual.

FARS and Imputation of Alcohol Results

Driving while intoxicated has been recognized as a significant serious safety factor for decades; at the same time, it’s long been recognized that many involved in fatal traffic collisions (mostly drivers but sometimes peds and bicyclists) do not have recorded alcohol test results. This nhtsa report published in 2002 explains most of the deep background and terminology on the scheme to “fill in” missing results: Continue reading “Use of alcohol as a risk factor for bicycling injury”

Non-traffic traffic crashes

 

This is a placeholder for info for what I am referring to as a non-traffic  (you can click there to get a list of incidents like this) traffic crash. Which I define as some sort of traffic crash that doesn’t get reported in official traffic crash stats. The most common reason these incidents might fall into this category is they occur on private property, like a parking lot, or private streets, like cyclist Robert McCain who was killed in a collision on a private street, or inside a building driver-slams-into-day-spa-1-dead-4-go-hospital. Other reasons, especially for cyclists, is for crashes “count” they have to include at least on motor vehicle in transport; so e.g. a cyclist crashing into a parked vehicle is not counted; nor are cyclists who have “simple” falls, or bike-bike crash, even when resulting in death (for example in 2014 see Karl Gerschutz and Jim Walen fatalities, respectively). Likewise bike-bike, or bike-ped crashes are not reportable as traffic crashes. Continue reading “Non-traffic traffic crashes”

Scottsdale Golf-Cart Shuttle Crash

First off; this has nothing whatsoever to do with a bicycle. This is interesting in light of the pedicab crash last year (golf carts apparently are being used to provide non-taxi shuttles in the immediate downtown area); and also wondering if this will generate an ACR? (Arizona Crash Report). I assume it would but you never know. For example, two of last year’s (see 2013 grid) bicyclist fatalities did not result in an ACR for various reasons; one a bike-MV collision on private streets, and another bicyclist hit-and-run with an ATV. An ACR is generally required if a crash involves at least on motor vehicle on a “trafficway”… see do-all-crashes-count for more. Continue reading “Scottsdale Golf-Cart Shuttle Crash”

A Tale of Five Phoenix Bike-MV collisions.

Fault was assigned to the bicyclist in four of the five reports. In two of those, the bicyclist was doing something obviously illegal/wrong (riding the wrong way in the roadway, and running into a stopped vehicle). However, the other two do not support that finding — in one a motorist violated a bicyclist’s ROW by turning into it, and in the other a bicyclist was struck by a motorist who was attempting to turn right-on-red.

Perhaps the reason Phoenix has a persistently high bicyclist MaF (Most at Fault) rate is the officers are often not investigating bike-MV crashes correctly?

Continue reading “A Tale of Five Phoenix Bike-MV collisions.”

Driver slams into day spa; 1 dead, 4 go hospital

[Updated; as expected/suspected this death and injuries DO NOT appear in official crash records from ADOT, nor will they appear in the FARS when that is released. See this comment for how I checked asdm]

9/27/2013. A story like this, besides being a tragedy, tends to make headlines (even going national,  usatoday.com story) but, Seriously, how often does stuff like this happen? Apparently regularly; like the shopper killed inside a Tucson convenience store in July…. or… 11-year old boy dead in a Phoenix parking lot in May… or … 2 Dead in Phoenix after pickup slams into bus stop  in March… or… 1 Dead at a Peoria Walgreens sitting on the bench in front of store in 2010… This is just what i noticed reading the paper; These were all in the recent past, just in Arizona. This is not a complete list! ha. Continue reading “Driver slams into day spa; 1 dead, 4 go hospital”

GIS, mapping, crash reports vs. ASDM

Some notes on mapping using the latitude/longitude; and the ASDM (Adot Safety Data Mart) dataset.

Here is a detailed breakdown of a crash chosen more-or-less at random (I wanted to choose crashes that were *not* at intersections) that occurred 2012-10-12 at a driveway just east of 51st Ave on Indian School Rd. (if the link doesn’t work use 33.494971/-112.167771, the lat/long specified in ASDM). It is ADOT incident number 2672854, Phoenix file number 12001836231 (though it was listed as 201836231 in ASDM). Continue reading “GIS, mapping, crash reports vs. ASDM”

Collision Manner

[Warning/correction not yet made: in the table below where it says MV-only, that’s not quite correct, it’s really incidents where no pedalscylists are involved. The MV-only calculations should also exclude pedestrians; this can be accomplished by saying u.eUnitType LIKE ‘PED%’  In the query below i corrected it but didn’t correct the table; the percentages don’t really change since there are relatively few ped crashes ]

Here is a breakdown of Collision Manner, and rates, for MV collisions (i.e. one or more MV, and not involving a ped or bicyclists) compared to bike-MV collisions.

The megatrends are that rear end collisions are, by far, the predominant manner of collision for MVonly crashes; wheres for bike-MV crashes this manner is quite infrequent — almost twelve times more frequent. For bike-MV crashes, the predominant manner is angle, i.e. so called “turning and crossing” movements (although left turn is broken out as a separate manner).

The 38% rate of REAR END crashes for MVs actually understates the rate — if you back out the number of SINGLE VEHICLE crashes; you see that nearly half of all multi-car collisions are REAR END(!). 38,499/(101,055 – 18,647) = 47%. Inattention? Does this mean that motorists actually are more attentive to same-direction traffic when it’s a bicyclist, compared to another motorist? hmmm.

+------------------------------+-------+--------+------+--------+-------------+
| eCollisionManner             | MVonly| MVrate |bikeMV|bikerate|MV:bike ratio|
+------------------------------+-------+--------+------+--------+-------------+
| REAR_TO_REAR                 |   287 | 0.0028 | NULL |   NULL |        NULL |
| UNKNOWN_99                   |   859 | 0.0085 |   40 | 0.0189 |  0.44973545 |
| REAR_TO_SIDE                 |   895 | 0.0089 |   11 | 0.0052 |  1.71153846 |
| SIDESWIPE_OPPOSITE_DIRECTION |  1244 | 0.0123 |   46 | 0.0217 |  0.56682028 |
| HEAD_ON                      |  1438 | 0.0142 |   45 | 0.0212 |  0.66981132 |
| OTHER_97                     |  3160 | 0.0313 |  404 | 0.1905 |  0.16430446 |
| SIDESWIPE_SAME_DIRECTION     | 10727 | 0.1062 |  124 | 0.0585 |  1.81538462 |
| LEFT_TURN                    | 11888 | 0.1176 |  189 | 0.0891 |  1.31986532 |
| ANGLE_FRONT_TO_SIDE          | 13411 | 0.1327 | 1194 | 0.5629 |  0.23574347 |
| SINGLE_VEHICLE               | 18647 | 0.1845 | NULL |   NULL |        NULL |
| REAR_END                     | 38499 | 0.3810 |   68 | 0.0321 | 11.86915888 |
+------------------------------+-------+--------+------+--------+-------------+
total num of MVonly crashes = 101,055.  total num of bike-MV crashes = 2,121
source: 2012 ASDM

Continue reading “Collision Manner”

It’s like a war zone out there…

Walk in the crosswalk; get hit with flying debris from a red-light-runner? Seriously, how often does this happen? (note to self — check ASDM for 2013, whenever that becomes available, and see if the peds show up in the collision — my guess is no but i really don’t know what the story is)

azcentral.com: …At about 9a.m. Sunday (3/10/2013), Kaylynn Ruth Kayanie, 25, was driving west on Broadway “at a high rate of speed” when she ran a red light and struck another vehicle that was traveling south on Priest Drive… The driver of the southbound vehicle, a 45-year-old woman, was ejected and taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries…  Two pedestrians who were in the crosswalk heading south on Priest at the time of the collision were hit by flying debris and taken to the hospital, where they were treated for cuts and bruises and released the same day, she said. Impairment does appear to be a factor in that case and investigators are awaiting drug-test results

The same story notes that the suspected impaired driver Veronica Muckerman made a bad left, killing a motorcyclist Elsa Tovar last week; was apparently driving without a license, due to being revoked in 2011 for another dui.