Preventing and understanding the underlying causes of car accidents continues to be a key public safety issue. Car accidents remain commonplace throughout the United States, retaining its status as a significant cause of death. Thus, it is important that this issue be studied as to further prevent deaths and property damage.
Analysts point to a myriad of reasons as to why car accidents occur. According to the Critical Reasons for Crashes Investigated in the National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey (2015), for the 5470 weighted samples, about 50% of the critical reasons for car crashes involve slick roads (loose debris, ice, etc), while fog/rain/snow are involved in around 4% of crashes. Note, however, that these given reasons are not the “primary causes” of the car crashes, just the “immediate reason for the critical pre-crash event and is often the last failure in the causal chain of events leading up to the crash.”
In addition, according to the Road Weather Management Program’s “How Do Weather Events Impact Roads?”, precipitation and fog causes a lessens vehicle traction and environmental visibility. The website also states that 22% of crashes from 2005-2014 involve poor weather, including slick road conditions. Wet pavement, rain, and snow/sleet are involved in 73%, 46% and 17%, of weather related crashes, respectively.
Given this background information, we hope to find patterns of interest between weather, environmental conditions and poor driving, in regards to injury severity and and the amount of injuries within crashes in Allegheny. By analyzing these patterns, we hope to provide more insight into car accidents and contribute to preventing more unnecessary destruction. This Jupyter Notebook will serve as a record of our data analysis.