[palewire]

I worked on the data analysis for this story, which was published at a Jupyter Notebook of Python code.

https://github.com/datadesk/street-racing-analysis/blob/mast...

If you have any questions, shoot.

[gknoy]

Do you have suggestions on how I might find information about the _total_ numbers of traffic related fatalities in LA during similar times? (I'm interesting in knowing what fraction of car-related deaths are due to street racing.)

For example, 2016 had 260 deaths from car accidents from one source [0], and only 11 of those were from street racing, less than 5%. (It's possible that the article I linked counted deaths differently than the data you were working with, though, so it's hard to compare the two.) Street racing related deaths are tragic (especially as half of them are _not the drivers_), but I wonder if we are spending proportionally similar amounts to prevent the larger pie-slice of automotive deaths.

Good grief, I feel so callous even asking this kind of question. :-/

0: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-2016-traffic-dea...

[tekromancr]

I don't think it's callous at all. In fact, it's a sort of higher order empathy. If the goal is to save as many lives as possible, then this is exactly the right way to think about these things.

It's like how most Americans are more likely to die from obesity related diseases than terrorism, but we spend orders of magnitude more resources trying to prevent terrorism.

[Scramblejams]

Not callous at all. We all have a limited amount of attention to pay to things, and as a society we have a limited amount of political and monetary capital to direct at problems. So we should focus on those problems that yield the biggest bang for the buck.

The media is frequently a bad actor in this. Since humans aren't generally good at assessing risk, value propositions like "How to keep your kid from being struck by lightning! Film at 11!" are actively counterproductive. I believe media has an ethical responsibility to allocate their resources and grab eyeballs in line with the magnitude and tractability of the problems they cover, but that's not what sells ad spots. :-(

[palewire]

There's a state database compiled by CHP called SWITRS that tracks traffic accidents. You can find it here. http://iswitrs.chp.ca.gov/Reports/jsp/userLogin.jsp

We don't call it out by name in the story, but it's the kind of existing government system that could be expanded to provide a better, official count of street racing deaths.

Our Los Angeles Times team has mined SWITRS in the past for other stories, like these:

http://graphics.latimes.com/la-pedestrians/

http://graphics.latimes.com/la-bike-hit-and-runs/

[usrusr]

In deaths per mile driven, even a single victim every few years would make street racing the low hanging fruit.

[ChuckMcM]

This article (http://ktla.com/2017/04/03/l-a-traffic-deaths-rose-43-percen...) says there were 260 traffic fatalities in 2016 on LA's streets. From the street racing article it appears that roughly 11 of those were related to street racing? So 5% ?

[palewire]

I appreciate your effort to bring some context to the analysis.

However, as we unpack in the story, our total is likely an undercount due to the problems in tracking street racing related crashes.

[samschooler]

No questions, I just wanted to say this is really cool seeing the data with analysis in its final form. I wish more articles included data like this.

[palewire]

Thanks!

If you're a Python person, I'd love to hear what you think of how I structured the notebook.

There isn't a set style for writing these and I've been experimenting with different forms lately.

In this case, I pushed back some of the bigger code chunks into separate Python modules.