Saturday, March 08, 2008

Tracking NJ Bicycle and Pedestrian News Reports

We have created a map that is compiling 2008 bicycle and pedestrian crash newspaper reports. Our information comes from the hard work of the interns at the NJ Bicycle and Pedestrian Information Center at Rutgers University who scour the internet for bicycle and pedestrian news in New Jersey (good news as well as the bad).


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Many crashes especially non fatal crashes are rarely reported in the media. This compilation hopefully will enable us to shed some light as to where some of the crashes are occurring and, more importantly how the media is reporting them.

While most of the reports are "police blotter" reports there are some try to go more in depth with personal stories. This is especially true when children are involved.

Conversely you can read other stories that clearly pin the blame on the victim. It will be often be noted that the victim was wearing dark clothing, swerved into traffic, not wearing a helmet, stepping into the roadway etc. And only a small percentage of the crashes involve citations. So far this year reported citations for cyclists are nearly on par with motorists.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah! You gotta' love them interns at the NJ Bike/Ped Center.