If you are seeking out a topic for an in-depth investigative piece, or if you just need that nugget of information to follow up on the most recent plane crash, transportation data has you covered.
Story ideas abound in data such as hazardous materials, boating accidents, truck accidents or any of numerous aviation datasets.
Readers of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram learned where some of the most dangerous routes in Texas were thanks to one reporter's use of data.
Jeff Claassen used Microsoft FoxPro and Excel to examine the dangers of driving on Texas highways and interstates. The paper specifically wanted to find where drivers in north Texas and statewide were most likely to encounter a bad accident.
With help from transportation experts, Claassen devised a method to use average daily traffic figures to calculate a rate of serious wrecks per volume of traffic.
One thing to keep in mind when working on any story that relies on statistics is that it is necessary to normalize the data. To normalize his data, Claassen took into consideration the number of vehicles travelling on a specific roadway.
"Other newspapers had analyzed Texas accident data, but focused on the total number of fatalities or fatal wrecks for each segment of a freeway or highway, called a 'control section,'" Claassen said. "That seemed incomplete because the fact that one roadway had more fatalities or fatal wrecks than another could just be the result of having more traffic. Also, the control sections varied in length from as short as a mile to more than 30 miles, making them difficult to compare to each other."
With help from transportation experts, Claasen devised a method to use average daily traffic figures to calculate a rate of serious wrecks per volume of traffic. He also broadened the story by including serious injury accidents.
The paper used accident report data from the Department of Public Safety, which consisted of about 1.9 million records from 1993 to October 1999 (the most recent available). The Fort Worth Star-Telegram also obtained the Road Inventory file from the Texas Department of Transportation, which provided average daily traffic figures for the roadway "control sections."
But this is where some problems began. "Our first roadblock was incomplete data. The DPS data notes the location of some accidents using 'control sections,' and others using city accident-location codes. That omitted important places like Houston and San Antonio from the mix, so we requested more data to fill in the holes," he said.
Claassen then focused the investigation by analyzing wrecks from January 1997 to October 1997 to give the study more accuracy. Transportation analysts told him that time frame was an accurate look at the average number of accidents. State officials warned Claassen that the distance of control sections sometimes change. So, with help from the transportation institute, he was able to develop a method to calculate the rate of serious injury and fatal wrecks.
Cable cars
Even if a story doesn't start from the data, transportation stories can be found anywhere in the city. For example, Dan Noyes of KGO-TV in San Francisco took an in-depth look at cable car safety. The story found that the cable cars are not as safe as many people might think.
"I decided to look into the cable car story after seeing several accidents over the months," Noyes said. "I wondered how this piece of San Francisco history compared to other forms of transportation."
Using accident reports from the California Highway Patrol, Noyes was able to put together a spreadsheet in Excel. With that spreadsheet, he analyzed how many accidents occur per million passenger miles traveled for the different modes of transportation -- car, light rail, bus and cable car. The biggest problem KGO-TV had was getting authorities to realize that his station had a right to the information.
Boating accidents
Karl Ebert of The Northwestern in Oshkosh, Wis., used the federal Recreational Boating Accidents Database to look at the number of boating accidents on Wisconsin waters. He found several instances of accidents that were attributed to alcohol and the boater's inexperience in maneuvering the vessel.
"People up here love three things: booze, boats and speed. Each summer we report stories about boat accidents, most of them brought on by bad behavior of one sort or another, and decided that we needed to look into the issue to see just how big a problem there actually is out on the water," he said.
The data did help give the story more accuracy, but Ebert ran into a few problems along the way.
"The biggest problems were the inability and in some cases unwillingness of county officials and local wardens to provide information about tickets that had been written on the water. Because of time and publication scheduling constraints we decided to go with more anecdotal information. That was frustrating, but I don't think it hurt the main thrust of the story," Ebert said.
There were also instances in which he found some problems in the data itself. There was a change in the data's format from several years ago, and because of that, not all of the fields matched up. He also found that a field indicating alcohol involvement was unreliable in historical data because it hadn't been consistently reported.
Devon Hammes can be reached by e-mail at devon@ire.org