About the Regional Traffic Risk Map

A temporal-spatial data visualization application developed during the 2018 Namibia Open Data Hackathon.

Data visualization is an important tool for understanding multivariable datasets.
This application is a temporal-spatial visualization of vehicle-related accidents in Namibia.
The data was scraped from tables in a 2016 MVA Fund publication titled "Road Crash and Claims Report."
By re-presenting the data in a multidimensional format, we provide deeper insight into the problem.
With insight comes understanding, and with understanding we can develop a solution.

The following tables were scraped from this PDF provided by the Namibia MVA Fund.

Table 2: Crashes per month (2011-2016)
Table 5: Types of Vehicles involved in crashes per region (note: "Crash Reason" *table appears mislabled).
Table 6: Crashes by day of week per region
Table 7: Type of vehicles involved in crashes per region
Figure 4: Crashes by time of the day (2016)

The extracted data is compiled into a composite "risk" number per region. All the region risks numbers are then normalized according to the largest in the set, scaling them to a value between 0.10 to 0.90. The scaled values are then used to shade the map, with 0.10 being light and 0.90 being dark. Because time is one of the data features, we are able to animate changes in risk according to time of day, day of week, and month of year.

This is a proof of concept with significant shortcomings. It cannot be improved without access to higher granularity data. For example, we would like to have specific details for each crash, such as time and GPS coordinates. But this information is not openly accessible, at present.

Here is the source code to the application.

"Cheap High Quality Software" is the name of the development team.

These are the team members, in randomized order: