- Project Overview
- Project Background
- Connect
- Getting Started
What is the goal of the project?
The goal of the project is to promote the development of safer roads by identifying areas of high risk in a city's road network. It seeks to support the decision-making of transportation departments in 3 ways:
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Identify high risk locations - which roads in the network represent the greatest risk of crashes?
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Explain the contributing factors of risk - what are the features, patterns and trends that result in a location having elevated risk?
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Assess the impact of intervention - what is the effect of a past or planned intervention on the risk of crashes?
Who are the intended users of the project?
Though originally begun as a collaboration between Data4Democracy and the City of Boston, the project is now being developed to work for any city that wishes to use it. City transportation departments and those responsible for managing risk on road networks are the intended users.
How does the project achieve its goal?
The project uses machine learning to generate predictions of risk by combining various types of data. Right now it makes use of:
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road segment data to build a map of a city's road network, presently being sourced from OpenStreetMap
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historical crash data to determine which locations have proved high risk in the past, provided by participating cities through their open data portals
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safety concerns data to understand where citizens believe their roads are unsafe and the nature of their concerns, also provided by participating cities by way of their respective VisionZero programs or SeeClickFix
Future versions of the project are likely to make use of:
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traffic volume data to understand which roads experience the highest traffic and how changing trends of usage might affect risk
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more detailed road features including speed limits, signals, bike lanes, crosswalks, parking etc.
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road construction data
Predictions are generated on a per road-segment basis and will be made available via a searchable web visualization, with roads of highest risk easily identifiable. Details of which factors are most associated with risk on each road will also be included.
What are the requirements for use?
Any city that wishes to can make use of the project. At a minimum, geo-coded historical crash data is required. Beyond this, cities that can supply safety concerns data (VisionZero or otherwise) will be able to generate more advanced predictions of risk.
What is the release schedule?
The intended roadmap of development for the project can be found at https://github.com/Data4Democracy/boston-crash-modeling/projects
How can I access the project?
This repo can be downloaded and run in its entirity using Docker, or you can see a current deployment of the project at https://boston-crash-model.firebaseapp.com/
This project was originally begun as a collaboration between Data4Democracy and the City of Boston.
On Jan 25th, 2017, 9 pedestrians were hit in Boston by vehicles. While this was a particularly dangerous day, there were 21 fatalities and over 4000 severe injuries due to crashes in 2016 alone, representing a public health issue for all those who live, work, or travel in Boston. The City of Boston would like to partner with Data For Democracy to help develop a dynamic prediction system that they can use to identify potential trouble spots to help make Boston a safer place for its citizens by targeting timely interventions to prevent crashes before they happen.
This is part of the City's long-term Vision Zero initiative, which is committed to the goal of zero fatal and serious traffic crashes in the city by 2030. The Vision Zero concept was first conceived in Sweden in 1997 and has been widely credited with a significant reduction in fatal and serious crashes on Sweden’s roads in the decades since then. Cities across the United States are adopting bold Vision Zero initiatives that share these common principles.
Children growing up today deserve...freedom and mobility. Our seniors should be able to safely get around the communities they helped build and have access to the world around them. Driving, walking, or riding a bike on Boston’s streets should not be a test of courage.
— Mayor Martin J. Walsh
Join our Slack channel on the D4D Slack. If you haven't joined our Slack yet, fill out this contact form!
Leads:
- D4D Project Lead: Ben Batorsky @bpben
- City of Boston Project Lead: Andrew Therriault @therriault
Maintainers: Maintainers have write access to the repository. They are responsible for reviewing pull requests, providing feedback and ensuring consistency.
- "First-timers" are welcome! Whether you're trying to learn data science, hone your coding skills, or get started collaborating over the web, we're happy to help. If you have any questions feel free to pose them on our Slack channel, or reach out to one of the team leads. If you have questions about Git and GitHub specifically, our github-playground repo and the #github-help Slack channel are good places to start.
- Feeling comfortable with GitHub, and ready to dig in? Check out our GitHub issues and projects. This is our official listing of the work that we are planning to get done.
- This README is a living document: If you see something you think should be changed, feel free to edit and submit a pull request. Not only will this be a huge help to the group, it is also a great first PR!
- Got an idea for something we should be working on? You can submit an issue on our GitHub page, mention your idea on Slack, or reach out to one of the project leads.
Most of the work on this project so far has been done in Python, in Jupyter notebooks.
- Python 2.7 (we recommend Anaconda)
- conda (included with Anaconda)
You'll want to reproduce the packages and package versions required to run code in this repo, ideally in a virtual environment to avoid conflicts with other projects you may be working on. We've tested the environment.yml file on a Windows 64-bit machine and Linux and have done our best to ensure cross-platform compatibility, but if it doesn't work for you, please file an issue.
$ conda env create -f environment.yml
$ activate boston-crash-model
If you'd prefer to use a requirements.txt file, one is available in the data_gen folder for spatial features analysis and in the benchmark folder for running the benchmark model.
A basic Docker image has been created to run the project in a container, using the ContinuumIO anaconda base image (Python 2.7). The virtual environment 'boston-crash-model' is installed and activated when the image is started via a container, as well as an apache2 webserver (via supervisor daemon) to serve the visualization.
You can download the image from D4D's Docker Hub repo by running the following command, from a machine with the Docker engine installed:
$ docker pull datafordemocracy/boston-crash-modeling:latest
Alternatively you can build the image yourself from the Dockerfile by running the following from within the project repo:
$ docker build --tag datafordemocracy/boston-crash-modeling:latest .
Once you have the image, you can run it in a container. The project folder (/app) is intentionally empty within the image, so you'll also need the project repo from GitHub available on your local machine. To do this run:
$ docker run -d -p 8080:8080 --name bcm.local -v /local/path/to/project_repo:/app datafordemocracy/boston-crash-modeling:latest
The arguments to this command perform the following:
- -d detaches the container and runs it in the background (gives you your shell back)
- -p 8080:8080 maps port 8080 from the container to 8080 on your local machine (required if you want to view the visualization via browser)
- --name bcm.local names the container 'bcm.local' (or whatever value you specify)
- -v /local/path/to/project_repo:/app mounts your local machine's copy of the project repo into /app in the container.
Once you have a running container, you can get a shell on it to run the pipeline, test scripts etc. by running:
$ docker exec -it bcm.local /bin/bash
At the moment, the RF benchmark model is running off of a dataset of historical crashes in 2016 per street segment + week. All our processed data is in a private repository in data.world here -- ping a project lead or maintainer on Slack to get access. More detailed documentation is contained there.
Data can be downloaded from the web frontend to data.world; it is expected to reside in the data directory.
At a high level, there are a variety of raw data sources available to us:
- Historical crash data
- Street segment inventories
- The Vision Zero crowdsourced concerns map
- Other open city data (constituent requests, liquor licenses, assessing data)
Building off of Vision Zero crash data & the Vision Zero concerns map.
├── LICENSE
├── README.md <- The top-level README for developers using this project.
├── data
│ ├── external <- Data from third party sources.
│ ├── interim <- Intermediate data that has been transformed.
│ ├── processed <- The final, canonical data sets for modeling.
│ └── raw <- The original, immutable data dump.
│
├── docs <- A default Sphinx project; see sphinx-doc.org for details
│
├── models <- Trained and serialized models, model predictions, or model summaries
│
├── notebooks <- Jupyter notebooks. Naming convention is a number (for ordering),
│ the creator's initials, and a short `-` delimited description, e.g.
│ `1.0-jqp-initial-data-exploration`.
│
├── references <- Data dictionaries, manuals, and all other explanatory materials.
│
├── reports <- Generated analysis as HTML, PDF, LaTeX, etc.
│ └── figures <- Generated graphics and figures to be used in reporting
│
├── requirements.txt <- The requirements file for reproducing the analysis environment, e.g.
│ generated with `pip freeze > requirements.txt`
│
├── src <- Source code for use in this project.
│ ├── __init__.py <- Makes src a Python module
│ │
│ ├── data <- Scripts to download or generate data
│ │ └── make_dataset.py
│ │
│ ├── features <- Scripts to turn raw data into features for modeling
│ │ └── build_features.py
│ │
│ ├── models <- Scripts to train models and then use trained models to make
│ │ │ predictions
│ │ ├── predict_model.py
│ │ └── train_model.py
│ │
│ └── visualization <- Scripts to create exploratory and results oriented visualizations
│ └── visualize.py
Project structure based on the cookiecutter data science project template. #cookiecutterdatascience