Curious about the number of fatal accidents that have taken place along your favorite route to work?
There’s an app for that.
DangerZones uses Google Maps to pinpoint over 200,000 vehicle fatality locations across the U.S.
Danger Zones is an iPhone app that displays five years of vehicle fatality locations across the country and plots the accidents as points on a Google map.
The GPS Location service shows your current location and displays up to 1,000 DangerZones. The GPS also will repositions the map as you drive.
Each accident report offers very detailed information about the accident, such as day/date/time, sex/age, number of fatalities, speed, drug/alcohol involvement, ejection, extraction and hit and run.
In searching along Lake Shore Drive, I can see that between 2004 and 2008 the bulk of fatal accidents took place between Hollywood and Belmont — 9; between Belmont and Chicago Avenue, just one.
Danger Zones will set you back $.99, and a lite iPhone version is free, but offers far less in terms of data.
I wouldn’t call this a must-have app, but as a research tool, the data alone is worth the dollar.
And after crunching said data, the developers found that:
– 53 percent of teenage motor vehicle fatalities occur on weekends.
33 percentof teenage motor vehicle fatalities were the result of speeding.
Nearly one-third of all U.S. vehicle fatalities involve alcohol-impaired drivers.
On average, 40,000 people die in vehicle collisions each year.
More than 12,000 deaths are attributable to alcohol or drugs.
Not ground-breaking stuff, but certainly more insight than maybe we are used to getting from an application on our mobile phone.