Keen readers of our blog will have followed our updates on the latest round of improvements to Collideoscope, a joint project with Merseyside Road Safety Partnership.

These are now shipped and ready for you to use, so here’s a quick guide to what’s new. Or, if you want the tl;dr version:

• It’s more obvious what the site’s for, where reports are sent and why
• With our new ‘heatmap’ visualisations you can see at a glance where most incidents have been reported
• Data can be easily downloaded for your own purposes
• We’ll guide users to make a police report if their incident warrants it

A clear proposition

After putting quite a bit of thought into wording across the site, we hope that Collideoscope’s two aims are a lot more prominent throughout. These are to collect data on cycling incidents, and to make that data available to those who need it.

This double aim is something that many mySociety sites have in common: they need to cater for people who want to make a report, and people who can make use of the data that those reports generate.

Let’s look at how our recent changes meet the needs of  each of these audiences.

Making reports

Where do reports go?

Collideoscope is based on the same software as FixMyStreet, but unlike our street fault site it doesn’t send your report with the expectation that it will be ‘fixed’.

Instead, here’s what happens:

• Just like FixMyStreet, your report is immediately published on the Collideoscope website for anyone to see.
• It becomes part of the database of incidents that is available for researchers, campaigners etc, to draw upon.
• At the same time, a copy of the report is also sent to your council, but this is to feed into their understanding of dangerous hotspots in their area, rather than with any expectation that they’ll respond.

Suggesting next steps

Of course, there are certain types of incident which should always, by law, be reported to the police. These include those where there’s any injury or damage to property.

Now, we don’t want anyone to think that Collideoscope is an alternative to making a police report. At one point, we considered adding functionality that would allow you to additionally send your report off to the police, but we found that this would be a monumental task, far above the resources we have for this phase of the project.

Zarino, whose research has helped inform these improvements, explained:

Sadly, there’s no standard across the UK that we could plug into: no common set of questions to be answered, no common place for the information to be sent. Plus, the (paper!) police reporting forms are really long — they aim to gather everything that would be needed, should the case go to court.

We didn’t think recreating those forms online would help anyone – not least because the police would, in all probability, just ask the reporter to redo it all on a paper form.

At this point in time, it seems the police are far more geared up to reports being made by phone or in person. So with all this in mind, we’ve ensured that when a user makes a report that meets the required degree of severity, they’re prompted to also let the police know.

Because we have the postcode of the spot where the incident happened, we’re able to give the user a link to the correct police force for the area, and so as not to divert the task in hand, we do this once the Collideoscope report is confirmed.

Users making any type of report will also see a link through which they can find their local cycling campaign group, in case they want to get proactive about improving road safety.

Using Collideoscope’s data

By neighbourhood

There are a number of ways to access the data on Collideoscope.

As with FixMyStreet, you can view any neighbourhood by inputting the postcode or place name in the search box on the homepage (or asking it to automatically geolocate you). You’ll then see all the incidents reported in the area, with the option to include police reports (England only).

But Collideoscope also has a new feature that makes it easier to understand the density of reports: you’ll notice that some of the roads appear in varying shades of orange. The deeper the colour, the more reports have been made on that street — and if you’re a cyclist yourself, you’ll know at a glance where you need to be extra careful.

So now you can check out your route and know where to take the most care. (If you find this feature distracting, just look for the ‘hide heatmap’ button at the bottom right of the screen).

By council or across the whole country

We’ve introduced a nifty new reports page, from which you can see how many reports have been made, either on a council-by-council basis or for the whole of the UK. Once you’ve picked your council, you can break it down even further, by ward.

There’s the additional option to view graphs grouping incidents by severity and by the other vehicle (if any) that was involved.

This data can be downloaded in CSV form, for anyone who might need it to support planning decisions, research or campaigns.

We hope you’ll go and have a click around the refreshed Collideoscope — and remember it’s there should you be unfortunate enough to get into a cycling scrape in the future. If you do, at least you’ll know that your data is contributing to a good cause.

Will you use this data?

As we’ve described, it’s now very easy for you to self-serve Collideoscope’s data, but all the same, we’d love to hear how you’ll be using it. Drop us a line!

We can also help with any technical questions you may have.

As Zarino explained in his recent blog post, we’ve recently spent time talking to road safety advocates and cycling groups, as we prepare for some big improvements to Collideoscope.

This has resulted in a shortlist of the tickets we’ll be working on, which you’re welcome to browse (and comment on, though this requires a GitHub account).

Collideoscope, like many mySociety projects, is a website of two halves. On the one hand, it invites those involved in a cycling collision or near miss to contribute information to a database; on the other, it provides an output of all that aggregated data for planners, researchers, campaigners and anyone else who will find it useful.

We’ll shortly be making some changes to the site so that its purpose and functionality are crystal clear; but in the meanwhile the next important step was to import the most recent batch of STATS19 data.

STATS19 is the form the police fill in when road accidents are reported, lending its name to the dataset released annually by the Department of Transport. We include this data on Collideoscope alongside our users’ reports: we just take the reports which refer to cycling incidents, and with this latest update we’re now displaying everything from 2013 up to 2016, the most recent data available.

That means, when you browse the site, you can see at a glance how many incidents have occurred in a specific area, not just from our users but from the primary national accident database too. Just click the checkbox (‘show reports from the Department of Transport’) at the top of the page to include them on the map.

So that’s our most recent bit of housekeeping; now watch this space for some bigger changes to Collideoscope.

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Image: Charisse Kenion

So the last time we blogged about Collideoscope—our cycling collision and near miss reporting service, based on the FixMyStreet Platform—we’d just begun an exciting new phase of exploratory work, looking into how well the site currently meets user needs around collision prevention, and whether it could do more, for instance, in helping cyclists campaign for better safety measures, or helping police collect collision reports more efficiently.

Since then, we’ve conducted a series of interviews, both with cyclists and campaign groups in the Merseyside area, as well as road safety data specialists from further afield, and also West Midlands Police, whose approach to cycle safety has garnered much praise over the last few years.

One-on-one interviews are a part of the user centred design toolkit that we use a lot at mySociety, when we’re early on in a project, and just want to map out the process or problems people face, without jumping to conclusions over how they could be solved right now.

In this case, we used the interviews to improve our understanding of five main areas:

• The physical process of reporting a collision, or a near miss, to the police.
• What incentives / disincentives cyclists have faced when reporting.
• How police forces currently deal with collision reports, and near miss reports.
• What role video recordings can play in reports / prosecutions, and what legal considerations need to be made, to prevent video damaging the case.
• What data cycle safety campaigners currently use, and what new data they feel could improve their case when arguing for better cycling provision.

The experiences, anecdotes, and connections we collect from interviews like these help us shape our thinking about how to build or improve our products, as well as highlighting particular avenues that need more research, or that we can start prototyping right away.

Take video camera footage, for instance. A number of Collideoscope users have asked that we allow them to upload clips from their helmet- or handlebar-mounted cameras, along with their reports.

But, on the other hand, we’d also heard a lot about how police forces were wary of collecting video footage, and especially worried about online videos damaging the chances of successful prosecutions in court.

Our recent interviews showed us the line isn’t quite so clear – savvy police forces realise video evidence is hard to argue with in court, and they want people to submit videos as often as possible. In reality, if a claim reaches court, it’s not the presence of videos online that poses a problem, but the finger-pointing or speculation that often accompanies online footage in the comments section below the video, or in social media posts. This was fascinating to hear, and immediately gave us ideas as to the changes we might need to make, to protect the integrity of video evidence, if we allowed cyclists to upload clips to Collideoscope.

It was also interesting speaking to campaigners about how the data collected by Collideoscope could help them raise the profile of cycle safety in their local areas, or on a national scale – especially data about near misses, something not covered by the UK’s official STATS19 dataset. We’re going to investigate how we could bring some of our boundary-related reporting expertise from MapIt and FixMyStreet onto Collideoscope, to help policy makers compare safety efforts in different areas, and help campaigners and councillors raise concerns over dangerous hotspots.

Later this month, we’ll begin prototyping how some of the things we‘ve learned could work their way into Collideoscope. We’re also particularly keen to investigate the technical feasibility of integrating directly into police incident reporting products, such as the Egress-powered Operation Snap used by police forces in Wales and soon, hopefully, other forces in the UK.

As before though, our research is by no means complete, so if you have expertise in this field, and would like to be consulted or participate in the project, we’d love to hear from you.

In 2014, along with Integrated Transport Planning (ITP), we created Collideoscope — a service based on our FixMyStreet Platform to map collisions and near misses between motor vehicles and cyclists.

Through a mix of imported Department of Transport Data and user submitted reports, the service highlighted potential dangerous hotspots before cyclists were killed or seriously injured.

Since the launch of Collideoscope, cycling has seen even more of an increase in popularity, and we suspect that there have been numerous new initiatives and campaigns developed to highlight and tackle the dangers faced by cyclists through insufficient provision of safe cycling infrastructure and dangerous driving.

So a recent approach from the Merseyside Road Safety Partnership (MRSP) was of great interest: they wanted to explore how we might revisit this task and determine if Collideoscope still has a role to play — or whether some other approach might be more beneficial.

Over the next three months, with the help of funding from MRSP, we plan to carry out a fresh discovery exercise to identify up to date user needs around collision prevention, and also determine how well served these issues are already by other similar initiatives around the country.

In addition to speaking to cyclists, campaign groups and safety experts, we’ll also be working with MRSP and in particular the Cycling Safety team within Merseyside Police to better understand how submission of reports can actually contribute to the development of actionable policy.

We’d also like to better understand the process of evidence submission, especially video evidence, in cases of near misses and collisions, and improve how that might lead to appropriate enforcement action.

For the moment we’re approaching all of this with a very open mind. We’re not going to assume that Collideoscope as it currently exists is necessarily the correct approach, and even if it does have a role to play we suspect it may need to be substantially altered to cater to any newly identified user needs.

Whilst this exploratory part of the project is going to be centred on Merseyside, we’re keen to hear from groups across the country and if you’d like to be consulted or participate in the research we would be keen to hear from you.

In the meantime, ride safe and we’ll update with progress reports over the next few weeks.

Photo by Roman Koester on Unsplash

It’s been a while since we looked in on Collideoscope, our project for reporting and collating data on cycling collisions and near misses, developed in collaboration with ITP. But what better time than now, when days are short and accidents have unfortunately, as always at this time of year, taken a sharp upturn.

So, let’s have a catch-up, and a reminder that you should use the service. Of course, we hope you won’t experience any problems, but remember that Collideoscope is there if you do.

Previously on Collideoscope…

As you may recall, Collideoscope is a site for reporting cycling incidents, collisions and near misses. Because it’s built on the FixMyStreet platform, it offers all the same functionality for the user: it’ll help you to pinpoint the precise location of the incident you’re reporting, and then send the details off to the relevant authorities.

When cyclists make a report, they’re contributing to an open dataset that improves the quality of the evidence base on cycling incidents.

While FixMyStreet sends reports off to councils, Collideoscope sends reports to local authorities’ highways departments, with the aim of highlighting potential accident blackspots.

The data, after going through an anonymisation process, is also shared with campaign groups.

Finally, the anonymised data is also available for anyone to download via Socrata, to be used for any purpose. One potential project we’d love to see, for example, would be route-planning applications to help cyclists avoid going through areas with a high density of incidents.

The data is also available to researchers, town planners and the police: when cyclists make a report, they’re contributing to an open dataset that improves the quality of the evidence base on cycling incidents.

So, that’s the model. Let’s have a look at how well it has stood up.

Data quantity

Collideoscope launched in October 2014 and users have thus far made a total of 1,195 reports.

In order to provide a more complete dataset with the clearest possible indicators of accident hotspots, we also imported STATS19 data from the annually-updated open police database of accidents, meaning that Collideoscope now contains data points on over 20,000 incidents across the UK.

Here’s what we’ve learned

Steering a project from concept to reality is always a learning process. Here are some of the key lessons that emerged:

• Collideoscope sends each report to authorities as it is submitted. It became clear that a bulk dataset would be easier for highways authorities to handle and to draw conclusions from, and this is now available.
• Originally, we’d believed that it would be useful if Collideoscope could forward reports to local police forces, so that they could be actioned where suitable. However, this proved impractical, because the Road Traffic Act states that collisions must be reported to a police officer in person. Collideoscope’s data would not be sufficient for police to take action on those cases which merited it.
• There was some concern that reports made via Collideoscope would replicate, rather than complement, the police force’s official STATS19 data. Happily, once enough reports had come into Collideoscope, a comparison was run and found that there is very little overlap between the two datasets.

While STATS19 data tends to cover serious incidents, it doesn’t hold much on the near miss or minor incidents that Collideoscope encourages users to also report  — and which make up 90% of the Collideoscope database. One of the underlying beliefs behind Collideoscope has always been that near miss data can tell us a lot about accident prevention.

Changes afoot

ITP have now stepped away from Collideoscope: we’re extremely grateful for their collaboration and support with the development and running of Collideoscope in its first couple of years. This move will mean that we can pursue funding from charitable grant foundations.

As you may recall from prior updates, the site was also supported by the Barts Bespoke campaign, a multi-pronged initiative to reduce accidents for cyclists. This support, and a further research grant from the Department for Transport, came to an end last month. As a result, we’ll no longer be asking people about injuries sustained when they file a Collideoscope report.

Collideoscope will keep on rolling: we’re open to potential partners and have plenty of ideas for further development, including the possibility of a public API, or incident-reporting forms that could be placed on any website.

If you’re from a local government, third sector or private company, and you’re interested in using Collideoscope data to enable better decision making on cycle safety, this’d be a great time to get in touch.

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Images:
This hill is dangerous by John Kennedy (CC by-nc/2.0)
Falling off bike sign by Rob (CC by-nc-sa/2.0)

Our project Collideoscope, in partnership with Integrated Transport Planning Ltd, has been collecting data on cycling incidents and near misses since its launch last October.

We’ve recently secured a small amount of innovation funding from the DfT’s Transport – Technology Research and Innovation Grant and that means that we’re in a position to add new features and functionality to Collideoscope.

Your chance to guide Collideoscope’s development

We’d like to hear your suggestions for new features on Collideoscope—or perhaps you’ve spotted something that could work better.

Please send your suggestions to hello@collideosco.pe, or use the site’s contact form. We need them in by March 18th, so you have two weeks to gather your thoughts.

What Collideoscope already does

If you’re involved in a cycling collision or near miss—whether you’re the cyclist, a motorist or a pedestrian—you can report it on Collideoscope.

The site sends your report to the relevant local highways authority, and also publishes it online (where there’s the option to remain anonymous).

More than this, though, Collideoscope acts a repository for data on incidents and near misses. In time, anyone will be able to use that data to spot accident hotspots, and the places where accidents are waiting to happen.

This data is available to all, but is especially designed for councils, police forces, road planners, and healthcare providers in their efforts to conceive safer roads, more effective accident deterrents and better emergency care strategies.

And what we’re planning to do

We’ve already committed to a few developments. We’ll be:

• developing better reporting to local councils;
• working with the police to notify them of issues that might require their attention;
• releasing anonymised reports as open data within the next 12 months

…but we’re not planning on stopping there. Your ideas and opinions will guide further development and help us raise further funds for the site.

We thank you all in advance for your time!

Image: Justin Swan (CC)

Not many people realise that we fund a proportion of our charitable work by carrying our commercial development and consultancy work for a wide range of clients.

Last year, we scoped, developed and delivered a real variety of digital tools and projects. Some of the projects were surprising. Some of them made us gnash our teeth, a bit, as we grappled with new problems. But all of them (and call us geeks if you like) got us very excited.

Here are just twelve of our personal high points from last year. If you have a project that you think we might be able to help you with in 2015, we’d love to hear from you!

1. We Changed the Way in Which Parliament Does Digital

This time last year, a small team from mySociety was poring over analytics, interview content and assorted evidence from Parliament projects dating back last 2-3 years, to help us put together a simple set of recommendations to conclude our review.

11 months later, Parliament have announced their first Head of Digital, fulfilling one of our key recommendations.

2. We helped the MAS and the FCA protect financial consumers

Two of our projects helped people financially.

We built the Money Advice Service’s (MAS) first responsive web application, the Car Cost Calculator.

This tool takes one simple thing you know (the car you wish to buy) and tells you roughly how much it’ll cost to run that car against any others you might be interested in. It has been one of MAS’ most successful online tools in terms of traffic and conversion.

We also built the Financial Conduct Authority’s Scam Smart tool, aiming to prevent financial scams.

This tool helps users considering a financial investment to check a potential investment. Users enter information about the type of investment, how they heard about it and the details of the company offering it to them and get back tailored guidance and suggested next steps to help them ensure the investment is bona fide.

3. We Gave Power to the People of Panama (soon)

Working with the The National Authority for Transparency & Access to Information (ANTAI) and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), we set up our first government-backed instance of our Freedom of Information platform, Alaveteli, in Panama.

This project will ensure that Panama’s FOI legislation is promoted and used, but it will also shine a light on ANTAI, who are responsible for ensuring ministries and organisations publish their information, and handling case appeals.

4. We Mapped All the Public Services in Wales

After we extended the Mapumental API to produce data output suitable for GIS (geographical information systems), the Welsh Government were able to map public services in Wales for their Index of Multiple Deprivation calculations.

Over the course of the year they have calculated travel times for over seventy thousand points of interest.

5. We Launched a New Organisation in Four Weeks

Simply Secure approached us in dire need of a brand, an identity and a website to accompany the launch of their new organisation to help the world build user-friendly security tools and technologies.

Cue four weeks of very intense work for mySociety’s designer, supported by members of the commercial team. And we did it.

6. We Printed Stuff BIG (and found people jobs)

mySociety developer Dave Arter figured out how to generate A1 sized maps from Mapumental for every job centre in the UK – all 716 of them.

Xerox will be using these with the DWP to help job seekers find work that is within reach by public transport. As a byproduct, Mapumental now handles high-fidelity print based outputs: get in touch if that is of interest.

7. We Opened Up Planning Applications

With Hampshire County Council we had the opportunity to build a new application to help assist members of the public and business better understand what was happening around them. For us, it was also the first application in which we worked closely with a provider of a linked data store, in this case Swirrl.

When Open Planning goes live, it will look to help improve social engagement and the economy of Hampshire through better understanding and transparency of planning data.

8. We Proved (Again) That FixMyStreet Isn’t All About Potholes

After a spate of cyclists’ deaths in London last year, we felt that the moment was right to build something that would support cycle safety in the UK.

We launched Collideoscope on October the 7th with our first sponsor—Barts Charity, with the aim of generating data both on incidents involving cycles, and near misses.

9. We Helped Launch a Film

We built a tool for the British Museum, to go alongside the general release of Vikings Live. The Norse Names project brought a sense of context and personalisation to a dataset gathered by the University of Nottingham.

10. We Made Data More Exciting

In 2013, we built an interface to help people explore the data in the National Rail Passenger Survey (NRPS) data explorer  for Passenger Focus.

This year, they asked us to build something similar for bus users. We’re entering the final week of development now, and the finished product should be launched in March.

The main aim of this site? To take data that could be considered pretty dry, and make it a lot more engaging.

11. We Fixed Yet More Potholes

This year Warwickshire, East Sussex, Hart & Harrogate joined the list of councils using FixMyStreet as their main street fault reporting platform.

That means that residents of those places can now make their reports direct from their council’s website, or via FixMyStreet, and either way they’ll have all the benefits of FixMyStreet’s smooth report-making interface.

12. We Showed Parliament the Way

And so, we end where we began. While Parliament were busy interviewing candidates for their new ‘Head of Digital’ position, we were commissioned to demonstrate what Hansard might look like were a platform like SayIt used instead of the largely print-based publishing mechanisms used today.

The result was shared internally. While SayIt may not be the end solution for Parliament, it’s great to have had some input into what that solution might be.

And in 2015…?

Got a project that you’d like us to be involved in?

Get in touch and tell us about it.

Image credits:

Eggs: Craig Sunter; Parliament: Greg Dunlap; Bubble car: Allen Watkin; To the Trains: Nic McPhee; Potholes: Tup Wanders; Parliament Duncan Harris. All Creative Commons.

 

Just how safe is your area for cyclists?

You can check the accident statistics for one answer to that question, but for every serious accident, there may be hundreds more near misses. And if the cyclists, drivers, and pedestrians involved don’t report them, that data is lost forever.

Enter Collideoscope

Launching today, Collideoscope aims to collect data on everything from full-on cycle accidents to near-misses.

We’re encouraging anyone involved in an incident to record it on the site, so that we can share it with Highways Departments, police forces, cycle campaigns and even healthcare providers.

In short, Collideoscope will amplify the impact of individuals’ reports, and improve understanding of factors affecting cycle safety in the UK.

Familiar but different

Collideoscope’s interface will be very familiar to those who have used FixMyStreet. That’s because it’s built using the same technology, where a user places a pin in a map to show where a problem occurred, and the system sends the report off to the right authority – in this case, the Highways department and/or the local police.

But there’s more to Collideoscope than just reporting accidents. Our first sponsors, Barts & The London Charity, will use it to collect data to go towards the Bespoke project. Barts and TLC is an innovative charity which – among many other activities – supports research and technology that will improve healthcare within their local NHS trust, and Bespoke is a multi-pronged initiative to reduce accidents for cyclists.

Collideoscope is also a bit different to the existing tools and campaigns out there. Just like FixMyStreet, Collideoscope publishes all reports openly, so anyone can browse them with no log-in required. And, while many of the mySociety team are keen cyclists of one sort or another, we are not campaigners – so Collideoscope does not aim to change anyone’s mind or make the case for better cycling provisions.

Instead, the idea is simply to share the data as widely as possible, increasing public knowledge about what’s effective in road safety, and what set-ups appear to make accidents more likely.

Data to the rescue

Over time, Collideoscope will show close misses and actual accidents across the country, building up a geographic picture of dangerous hotspots for cyclists. This data can be sliced in multiple ways – so for example, you could isolate all the accidents within a specific council’s boundaries, or look at them month by month.

Barts and TLC will be taking this data, and adding it to data on cycling injuries which they’ll be collecting in the emergency department at the Royal London Hospital. The final, joined up picture, will seek to find insight among such factors as whether the cyclist was wearing high-vis clothing, the surrounding road layouts, potholes in the area, and the type of vehicles involved.

Once all this data is in place, of course, the next step will be to make recommendations about how future accidents can be prevented. So for example, if a certain type of road layout is implicated in a large proportion of accidents, well, maybe that type of road layout should be phased out. Barts and TLC see the potential for extending the project in the future, looking into playground accidents, falls, and even street violence.

Better Together

Collideoscope is a partnership between mySociety and Integrated Transport Planning Ltd. With the time mySociety and ITP have invested and the support from our first sponsor Barts and the London Charity we have developed and launched the site, but we have so much more we’d like to do. We are seeking further sponsors as the project goes forward; if you’re interested in supporting then please get in touch.

Meanwhile – be safe out there. And in the unfortunate eventuality that you are not, have a cup of sweet tea, and then remember to log your accident or near miss on Collideoscope.