20.7 bike incidents per mile on Brooklyn’s Broadway: ‘You Are Here’ project

You Are Here is project out of MIT’s Media Lab, in which its creators make new maps every day of the cities in which they have lived. One of those cities is New York, so there are quite a few Brooklyn visualizations on here.

Here are a few insights about the borough we gleaned from studying You Are Here’s collection of maps.

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Bedford Avenue has had the most bicycle crashes, but it looks like Broadway is probably still more dangerous.

The Brooklyn bicycle crash map tracks reported incidents of bike wrecks where someone got injured. There were 3,735 such incidents from August 2011 to February 2014.

By far, the most incidents occurred on Bedford Avenue, but it’s also one of the longest streets in the whole borough. It goes all the way from Coney Island up into Greenpoint. That said, it is a thrill a minute to ride. There’s a “bike lane” up and down most of the street, unfortunately, most the community along Bedford views this as alternative parking, forcing cyclists to move back into the flow of car traffic again and again. In a way, it’s a bike lane worse than no bike lane at all.

As bad as that is, though, Broadway seems to be worse. Bedford Avenue is 10.2 miles long and it had 145 crashes along its length during the period visualized. Broadway, which carries riders from Williamsburg through Bushwick, had 89 crashes over 4.3 miles. That’s 14.2 crashes per mile for Bedford versus 20.7 for Broadway.

Leaving the hipster zone, Church Avenue, which runs east-west, south of Prospect Park, has had 11.2 collisions per mile over its 3.3 mile stretch. That’s not exactly a fun place to be either.

Sepsticemia (sepsis) is the number one reason for admission to NYC hospitals.

Septicemia is a serious bacterial infection that goes from bad to worse really quickly. Rapid heart rate, red patches on skin, fatigue, those are all signs. People look horribly sick when they have sepsis.

We went through all the Brooklyn hospitals and looked at the top five reasons for admissions at each one. Sepsis shows up on that list a lot. Other leaders: heart related conditions, conditions from alcohol and substance abuse, complications from diabetes, asthma and schizophrenic incidents.

There’s a lot of coffee in Brooklyn.

It looks like Brownsville could do with a shop, though.