I travel about 10 kilometres to work every morning. It’s a pretty straightforward trip and as far as I can tell there aren’t any traffic accident blackspots along the way.

Going to and from work every day, there is nothing to suggest there were 253 crashes along this route over five years involving vehicles, cyclists or pedestrians. Many people have been injured and fortunately nobody has been killed, but there roads themselves carry no permanent reminder of these collisions, of the slight risk anyone takes when they drive, cycle or walk.

Four in ten of these crashes were in the afternoon, Fridays were the worst day for collisions and almost two thirds were smashes between vehicles. The point at the journey in which there have been the most incidents is the intersection of Spencer Street and Collins Street, just outside The Age building.

I was able to find this information using Triprisk, a website that maps VicRoads crash data along selected routes, displaying the number of crashes as well as the age, time of day and type of road users involved.

Each crash location shows up as a bubble along the route, with the size of each placemarker determined by the number of crashes at that point. If there were any fatal crashes at a location the dot will always be colored red, but a larger dot does not mean multiple deaths.  

The markers are clickable and bring up an info window displaying crashes at that spot as well as the number of vehicles and people involved in collisions.

It’s worth mentioning that the number of people involved is not the same as the number of people injured. For example, if a car collided with a cyclist, that means two people were involved but chances are only one of them was injured.

Data analyst Liam Densley, Triprisk’s lead developer, said he hoped the tool would show the benefits of governments opening up data. The website uses information on crashes that VicRoads makes publicly available through its CrashStats database.

The tool emerged out of a company hack day and the team at Geoplex have been working away at the website since then. I first came across the website at an Open Knowledge Foundation event late last year in which members of Melbourne’s developer community met with representatives from VicRoads to discuss the potential of open data, the progress in opening up the information and what it was possible to do with the data.  

Like a lot of good open data projects, it takes information that a lot of people would find difficult to penetrate and presents it in an interesting way, giving users the opportunity to ask their own questions.

Mr Densley said he also hoped Triprisk would get people to think about driving, cycling or walking more carefully through areas that have recorded a lot of crashes.

He acknowledged it was possible the tool could scare road users but noted crashes could reflect traffic volumes along roads.

For example, there were 25 crashes on Glenferrie Road in Armadale between Malvern Road and Toorak road over five years but VicRoads traffic data shows 7700 cars travelled along that road segment every day on average in 2011.

Likewise, the tool does not incorporate pedestrian volume data. While Melbourne City Council keeps track of pedestrian numbers and has published its own nifty interactive, this sort of information is only available for sporadic points.

For the story on crashes involving pedestrians Aisha Dow and I wrote, we couldn’t get pedestrian volume data for Lonsdale Street, which would have added some extra perspective to the total number of incidents along that stretch. 

VicRoads updates its Crashstats database every six months, and Mr Densley said he would look into updating the tool with newer crashes once fresh data becomes available.

View the full version of Triprisk.