Have you ever walked down the sidewalk in your local city, seen a pothole in the sidewalk and you, someone you love, or a random person took a nose dive off their bike or off your feet onto the pavement. While this may make you chuckle (especially if it is not you), is there really any connection between accident location and condition of the streets/sidewalks. I recently conducted a GIS survey of Geogre St. in New Brunswick, NJ to find out if there was a significant relationship between road hazzards and bike accidents.
While the actual analysis was done using ArcGIS, the accident data was downloaded from the Mappler website RU Bus to Bike, which uses User-Created Content (UCC) the data source for biking hazzards in New Brunswick. The accident data, orginally from the NJDOT was taken off of another Mappler site New Brunswick Bike Accident Locations.
While there were only 5 bike crashes reported along George St., a survey of these bike accidents discovered that every bike was at least 100 yards from an indicated road hazzard.
To make a more definitive statement, either more bike crashes along George St. must be documented, or the area studied must expand. Nevertheless, these findings give promise to further research into making New Brunswick a more bike-friendly city.
Bike N' Walk 
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