Hello I'm Robert Anthony and today I'm going to share with you some information about the project, some of the thought process that goes into it, and some public open datasets. Our project is about Texas road safety so the first thing i did was look for any information i could find that was free that had to do with statistics. If you look on txdot.gov, a site that has open source data, you can find Annual Texas motor vehicle crash statistics.
The ones i found most helpful and decided to download were "Comparisons of Motor vehicle traffic deaths" and "Crash and Injuries Cities and Towns". These two had relative information that could help with our projects. Things are identified like total of non-fatal crashes, increase or decrease in the number of deaths, unknown severity, fatal crashes, and the cities in which these deaths or crashes took place. Now these datasets aren't in excel so you have to scrape them but they are pretty well organized already. Putting them in excel will allow the team to be more direct and more precise on information we want and to be able to isolate it.
Interesting enough, my FOIA request was an extension of some of this i got from the dataset. I wanted to know what number of accidents involve bicycles and pedestrians. I sent this request to TxDOT Public Records, the same site that you can find the open data. This allows us to get more specific information that the open datasets won't give you. Our team may want to ask questions like "How dangerous is it for pedestrians to walk in Houston compared to Austin?" or "Is it more dangerous in 2022 for bicycle riders then it was in 2016?" just as two examples to given. After emailing txDOT they responded telling me that my request needed to be narrowed down as it was too broad in structure. I have been working on narrowing down what specific questions i want to ask so i can request again with a more specific request so that we may continue our research.
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