Charting the traffic accidents by time and road in Abu Dhabi

Making data more digestable is a task LLMs specifically excel at. This is a small experiment with this idea in mind. I created this small app where anyone can explore the patterns of traffic injuries in different hours of the day in Abu Dhabi. I hope it encourages more people to dive into open datasets that countries publish!

Abu Dhabi, thanks to the amazing people at Department of Government Enablement, publishes this kind of data openly. You can browse every dataset at data.abudhabi/opendata, and one of them is reported traffic accidents with the street, the time, and the cause. I built this as a cool experiment with Claude: map the accidents so you can actually see which roads to avoid at which hour. Pick a street, scrub the time dial to 17:00 to 18:00, and check your normal daily route to see your chances of stumbling into an accident. Drive safe afterwards!

Warning on accuracy: Not every road is placed perfectly. The accident file has street names but no coordinates, so the shapes come from OpenStreetMap, and OSM could not find some of them (Abu Dhabi's numbered or Arabic street names are sometimes missing). Those I moved into roughly the right spot as per my own knowledge of the city and some internet research, so a few are approximate and there can be mistakes.

I hope more governments release their data the way Abu Dhabi does. If they did, building something like this would go from impossible to an afternoon, anywhere and people could explore their cities and favorite places in more dimensions!