Site Calculates Risk Factors for Travelers

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/us/21risk.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

WASHINGTON, Jan. 20 — A middle-aged male pedestrian is four times as likely, on any given trip, to be killed by a car as is an elementary school student, according to a new interactive Web site that lets people compare travel risks.

The site allows users to assess the dangers of driving, walking, and riding a motorcycle or a bicycle, by season, region and personal characteristics of the traveler. It links two federal databases, one of traffic fatalities and the other of travel habits, to put the number of deaths into context by comparing them with what statisticians call exposure, or the extent to which people are in situations where there is a chance of a crash.

The site was put together by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, with support from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. It is being presented at the Transportation Research Board’s annual meeting, which begins Sunday, and is going public then, at hope.hss.cmu.edu.

Risk, the researchers emphasize, is not the number of people who die, but the probability of death per mile traveled, or per trip or minute of travel.

. . . more

and the site:

http://hope.hss.cmu.edu

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1. Not the most user friendly design on their webpage

great idea but design needs some work