Apologies to Mr. Colbert on the title.
Wonderful visual presentation of bike-car wrecks from The Oregonian.
We could do it in Charlotte and Raleigh, with information at sites like this one and this one and this one.
I spent about two minutes at the last one and made the (not so pretty) chart shown here. The hard part: The crash data site says, "For a detailed review of crashes in specific locations (e.g., corridors or certain intersections within a community), it will be necessary to obtain such information at the local level."
But it's possible.
Here's another example of mashing up publicly available information to make it useful for readers, from Marc Matteo with McClatchy in California.
Utopian ideas: Foundations could give rewards or grants to creators of such projects so they can take the time to write project "cookbooks" for other papers. Or foundations could fund time for local reporters and graphic artists to develop their own projects, without eviscerating slim newspaper staffs. The ideas are spinning off Ed Wasserman's critique of Propublica.
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More on bikes:
Obsessing, I looked at Polk County, the mountain training grounds for biker Hincapie of Greenville, S.C.
Only one crash, in 2006. Either reporting of incidents is an issue or mountain people like my aunt of Polk County are more courteous in their cars (as they swear under their breaths on two-lane mountain roads).
Lance has trained on Mount Mitchell, I believe. The story could be broadened to look at how international biker stars are safe in our mountains, but local commuters in our cities are taking their lives in their hands every day.
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