One of the prime interests of a city’s safety board should always be their roads. Ottawa may not be a city buzzing with energy – after all, it is a government town – but it’s one of Canada’s largest and with a sizeable population, the safety of the roads should always be of concern.

I set out to find out the five W’s of vehicle accidents in Ottawa. With this information, it would make it much easier for the city to identify and attempt to lower the amount of collisions that tale place in Ottawa.

You can find the information I used here and here.

The first set of data is stretched out five years from 2009 to 2013 (the latest road safety and collision report the City of Ottawa has released), and the second is from 2007 to 2011, in which I only took data on the age of all people that are involved in accidents, seeing as the first set of data failed to represent that specific category.

All my analysis was done through Excel, sorting and creating charts with the data. I also used ArcGIS, but we’ll examine that side of the data more near the end.

I found the time frame that had the biggest spike in accidents was the day’s second rush hour from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Oddly enough, there is a large difference from when everyone is travelling to work than leaving, even though around the same amount of cars are typically on the road.

I found that the age range that tend to be invloved with the most car accidents is 15 to 29, and it isn’t a close race. Drivers seem to be the most aggressive at a young age, I guess.

The time of day is one thing, but the bigger picture may be in weeks and months. Overall, more collisions are taking place as the week gets closer to the weekend and then drop right off.

And as you probably would’ve wondered, the months that seem to be the magnets for vehicle collisions are the ones in the cold of winter.

Those findings can be explained by the increase in poor conditions on the roads. Of course, most of the year the ground is dry, so you would expect the bulk of collisions to be on dry roads – which, they are – but rain, snow, ice and slush do contribute to the danger.

But probably the biggest weapon in all of the data is location. Sure, a city can pinpoint who tend to be in these accidents, what the roads are like at the time and what time they happen at, but it would be most helpful if they knew where to put up “slow” signs and show drivers where they need to be more cautious.

These are the top locations for collisions in Ottawa.

To make this an even better visual, I took the only maps the City of Ottawa released of fatal collisions from 2011-2013 and mapped them out with ArcGIS.

The yellow pins are 2011 collisions, the red are from 2012 and the green are the latest fatal collisions released for 2013.

Here are the maps I used: 2011, 2012, 2013.

So if you were going to pinpoint the most likely aspects of a collision in Ottawa, the description would go as follows.

A person in their early 20’s at West Hunt Club and Woodroffe collided with another vehicle on a Friday in January at 4 p.m while the roads were snow-free.