{"id":9255,"date":"2012-06-11T09:30:08","date_gmt":"2012-06-11T14:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.johntedesco.net\/blog\/?p=9255"},"modified":"2022-10-10T11:43:36","modified_gmt":"2022-10-10T16:43:36","slug":"wrong-way-crashes-on-san-antonio-highways-happen-more-often-than-you-might-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johntedesco.net\/blog\/2012\/06\/11\/wrong-way-crashes-on-san-antonio-highways-happen-more-often-than-you-might-think\/","title":{"rendered":"Wrong-way crashes on San Antonio highways happen more often than you might think"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Wrong-way<\/a><\/p>\n

A few months ago, my boss, Express-News Projects Editor David Sheppard<\/a>, asked me to see what we could find out about wrong-way crashes on highways. It seemed like there were a lot of these deadly accidents in the news lately, and local officials had recently unveiled a $500,000 pilot project<\/a> to install flashing wrong-way signs and radar on a 15-mile segment of U.S. 281.<\/p>\n

I wrapped up what I was working on and teamed up with reporter Vianna Davila<\/a>, who covers transportation. We had to answer two deceptively simple questions. How often do wrong-way crashes happen? And how does Bexar County compare to other counties?<\/p>\n

We turned to a giant database maintained by the Texas Department of Transportation called the Crash Records Information System<\/a>. It’s derived from accident reports filled out by law enforcement officers, and it tracks hundreds of details about every accident in Texas — including wrong-way crashes.<\/p>\n

But we soon learned there was no quick and easy way to filter the data for the specific wrong-way accidents we were looking for — crashes on major divided highways with exit and entrance ramps.<\/p>\n

Related: Road rage in Texas: Find accidents in your neighborhood with this interactive map<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The database had a “road type” field, with categories that included interstates, tollways and U.S. and state highways. So far, so good. But some state highways are actually busy roads, such as Bandera Road. The wrong-way crashes on those boulevards are different from the type of accident we were examining. We weren’t writing about distracted drivers who cross a center line into oncoming traffic. We were writing about drivers who head up exit ramps and into oncoming traffic on busy highways and interstates.<\/p>\n

We ended up selecting the five Texas counties with the largest populations, mapped the wrong-way accidents with Google Fusion Tables<\/a>, and then eyeballed each location to make sure it actually occurred on a major highway. Here’s how the finished product looked for Bexar County:<\/p>\n