Announcing @chpfatal: In response to the recent fascination with bike accident map projects, I’ve created @chpfatal on Twitter. It’s a real time feed of fatal car crashes in California as reported by the California Highway Patrol.
We had about 3,000 traffic fatalities in California in 2009, which is about eight lost lives everyday. The Twitter feed, which only grabs fatalities which occur on the highway and are reported to the CHP, has been running roughly two fatalities per day, while the official state statistics of 3000+ deaths tabulates all fatalities whether the responding police is the CHP or a local agency. The official state stats also record deaths that occur after the crash at, for example, the trauma center, while @chpfatal tweets mostly record the fatalities that occur on the highway itself or (sometimes) enroute to emergency treatment.
I plan to soon update my software so it creates a CSV database on the fly that can then be used by Google Fusion Tables so you can map, infograph and otherwise visualize the highway fatality data to your heart’s content.