Global Road Safety Tableau Visualization

Project Timeline:

8 weeks (November - December 2024)

Jessica Tania, Stephanie Cao

Team:

Tableau, Public Databases (World Databank, WHO, etc.), Canva

Toolkit:

Role:

Lead Data Visualizer

Tableau Dashboards, Topic pitch presentation, Recommendation & Insights Report, and Final Tableau Public Visualization (please follow link to see final Viz)

Deliverables:

Overview

Exploring road mortality rates through advanced data visualization techniques, including trend analysis, geospatial mapping, running totals, clustering, and interactive dashboards, to identify the most dangerous roads globally. My main role was to develop impactful visualizations to analyze global road mortality rates using advanced techniques like geospatial mapping, trend analysis, and clustering. Designed and implemented interactive dashboards to uncover patterns, identify high-risk areas, and deliver data-driven insights.

Significance of Topic

Understanding the factors that influence traffic accidents is critical to addressing this global problem that claims millions of lives each year and disrupts the lives of countless others with injuries and economic losses. Therefore, the study is significant because it examines how economic conditions, demographics, and driver's license policies affect traffic accidents around the world. By analyzing data such as GDP , driver's license age, gender distribution, and accident rates, it identifies disparities and presents actionable insights to inform targeted road safety measures. The findings are intended to guide policies to reduce traffic-related deaths and injuries.

Chosen Datasets:

1. Road Mortality, Population Density, GDP per Capita Data (WHO)

2. Seatbelt Usage Data (WHO)

3. Speed Limit Data (WHO)

4. Regions Data (UN)

5. Safety Score Index (Self Made)

6. Road Mortality Gender Statistics (DataBank | The World Bank)

7. Minimum Driving Age by Country 2024 (World Population Review

Data Visualization

Breath of visualization techniques - maps (geospatial analysis), line charts (trend analysis), bar charts (categorical comparison), histograms (distribution analysis), scatter plots (correlation), etc.

Additionally, we heavily considered interactivity by using dropdown filters, data range sliders, hover tool tips, and many more to ease interpretations for the audience. For instance, using filters, the visualization below shows that road mortality rates in Asia pale in comparison to African countries in the year 2017. This makes sense as GDP, is heavily disproportionate between both continents.

We also developed a custom safety score index to rank countries based on road safety. The index considered factors like road mortality rates, seatbelt usage, speed limits, and GDP per capita. The index scoring can be further explained in the public data viz; but for simplicity, the higher country’s GDP is, the higher their score. The index revealed that the top safest roads in the world are in Norway, Sweden and Ireland, while the least safest roads are in South Korea, Dominican Republic and Ghana. The visualization highlights how countries in Asia and Europe tend to have safer roads, while those in Africa and the Americas face higher risks.

Road Safety Index

Data Analysis

Key Insights:

Safer Roads: Countries with stricter speed limits, higher seatbelt usage, and better infrastructure (e.g., Norway, Sweden) have lower road mortality rates. Highest correlation category is a country’s GDP, having a major influence to road safety (besides U.S.A)

Behavioural Factors: Gender and seatbelt usage significantly impact mortality rates, while driving age policies showed no consistent effect. Additionally, population density’s lack of correlation to road safety, as it lacks (infrastructure context)

Regional Observations: Africa being the region contributing the most to global road mortality rates. Additionally BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries have improved their road safety from 2014-2019.

Recommendations with this Data:

Policy Development: Use insights to improve road laws, enforce speed limits, and mandate seatbelt use. This could look like lower speed limits in high-risk areas, data-driven urban planning, or improving infrastructure such as road signage.

Education: Promote safe driving behaviour through awareness campaigns. These campaigns will be data driven and aimed to target groups of high-risk drivers to emphasize risks of speeding, driving under the influence, and importance of seatbelt usage.

Global Benchmarking: Encourage countries to adopt practices from high-ranking nations to improve road safety worldwide. This could look like studying enforcement models, infrastructure improvement changes and public awareness strategies.

Reflections

Working on this project highlighted the importance of data quality and consistency in visualization. Throughout the process, I gained valuable insights into the challenges of handling large datasets and ensuring accurate representation of global road mortality rates.

I was able to achieve the following:

  • Recognized the need to allocate more time for data cleaning to improve accuracy and consistency.

  • Identified inconsistencies in country names across datasets, which led to missing data in the final analysis.

  • Learned that the quality of visualizations is directly dependent on data integrity, reinforcing the importance early-stage data cleaning

  • Learned the importance of incorporating visual storytelling with data visualizations

Conclusion

This analysis revealed the complex relationship between economic development, policy enforcement, and road safety outcomes. While wealthier nations tend to have lower road mortality rates, exceptions show that infrastructure and regulation are as crucial as GDP.

Key takeaways include:

  • Strong correlations between seatbelt laws, speed regulations, and road fatality rates.

  • The need for stricter enforcement of traffic policies to improve road safety.

  • The importance of leveraging data-driven insights to guide policy decisions and develop targeted interventions.

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