Safer Roads: New Brunswick

Inspiration

As a Public Safety Telecommunicator at Rutgers, I deal with unfortunately taking a lot of calls for car crashes all day. After being at my job for nearly three years, I began to realize that while the data to try to prevent accidents is there, the technology is not always present or easily accessible. While there does exist a dashboard from the New Jersey Department of Transportation, I have feel that it can be overwhelming with data. My project will make crash data in New Brunswick simple to see and bring out the most important information.

What it does

My project analyzes car crashes in New Brunswick in 2025. My main focus is to answer three questions:

1. Which intersections have the most accidents?
2. What time and day have the most accidents?
3. Where are pedestrians most getting struck by cars and what are the severity of the injuries?

How we built it

I used python analyze the data. I used pandas, streamlit, folium,jupyter notebook and matplotlib.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge was that one street would have multiple names which would affect the analysis, so I had to back and figure out how to clean those names so they all are the same string.

Another challenge was learning to use streamlit under time contsraint as it is my first time utilizing it.

Finally, the data from the Department of Transportation is from 2025 and not 2026. While this is not necessarily a challenge, it does affect how effective analysis can be since there is a delay in the dissemination of crash data that has happened in this year.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to create useful graphics in less than a day. This data analysis can actually save lives and while it may not prevent every accident, it may prevent at 1 accident or someone getting hit by a car.

What we learned

I learned a great deal in the last 24 hours. I have not touched python in a while and I honestly thought I would have not been able to complete this project. While I had to learn the python libraries again, I have also learned how you do not have to every coding language or tool to create code that has positive impacts on our local community.

What's next for Safer Roads: New Brunswick

I would like to continue working on cleaning the data to improve the analysis and analyzing other cities besides New Brunswick. I would also like to add more analysis:graphs and maps, while still keeping the dashboard simple and effecting. Finally, I would ideally like to present to the emergency services in our local area to see if a project like this would be impactful for them.

Data: https://njdot.aashtowaresafety.net/njdot-crash-data-dashboard#/

Built With

• folium
• matplotlib
• pandas
• python
• streamlit