Recently, I blogged about the difficulty of finding information about non-serious bicycle crashes — the most common kind.
This morning, thanks to a link from An Old Guy on Two Wheels, I came across a web site called Bikewise. This isn’t your usual biking advocacy, biking avocation site. It’s all about cataloging bike crashes, hazards, and thefts to make biking safer. According to the site, “It’s estimated that 75% or more of all crashes go unreported. We believe that by gathering detailed information on how and why crashes happen, we’ll be able to ride smarter.”
Bikewise is based in the Seattle area, but accepts crash reports from all over the country. The biker submitting the report is asked to include information about the circumstances of the crash, road and weather conditions, and perhaps most importantly, lessons learned from the crash.
Here’s an example:
Bikewise lists local crashes, statewide crashes, and crashes from throughout the United States. It’s the start of an interesting and helpful database. It’s still pretty new, and the number of crashes it lists is small, even nationally. But as word gets out, I expect this will grow rapidly.
That resource does have great potential… and it looks like there’s a few folks using it west of Boston.
This reminds me of a site <a href="http://roadbikingmassachusetts.com/find-a-safe-route-through-boston/"I just blogged about called The Right Ride which seeks to identify hazards and safe routes. It also is a nice mash up with Google Maps. One feature they’ve done well is to add the ability to rate entries, which would potentially help sort out the more informative entries. There’s a bunch of neat tips posted there. I know you’re not in Boston, but you might like to check it out as another good resource that could be expanded further. In fact, they are serving another dozen cities already.
Capturing crash information is an interesting idea. I imagine, however, that the information would be somewhat skewed by the perspective of the poster, particularly if more than one cyclist were involved in a particular crash.
Tom
Whoops.. that first link should point to here