WMS Accident Atlas

Where do the data come from in the accident atlas? The accident atlas contains information from road accident statistics based on reports from police departments. In several federal states, the police do not or are not yet fully absorbing the geocoordinates of the accidents. The current issue contains the accident data of nine federal states. As soon as the geocoordinates of the accident sites in other federal states are available, the accident atlas will be updated.What exactly is a road accident? Road accidents are accidents in which people have been killed or injured as a result of driving on public roads and places or where property damage has occurred.The police are required to provide information on road accident statistics. Consequently, accidents to which the police have not been called are not included in the statistics. Data on accidents, participants, vehicles, accidents and causes of accidents are recorded.How are the accident data processed? The police also record the geographical coordinates of the accident location during the accident in many federal states. These accident coordinates are processed and then presented in the accident atlas.In order to make accident focal points visible in maps, individual accident events are summarised via road sections. For each section of the road it is determined how many accidents have occurred and the section is colored accordingly. By zooming on a road section, the individual accident sites at road level become visible again as points.In order to assign the accident coordinates to the correct road sections, the data must be plausible. The accident data is also compared with the road geometries of the official surveying administrations. In this way, not only the distance of the accident coordinate to a road section is assessed, but also whether the information on the road designation collected by the police departments (e.g. “B54”) and to the road class (highway, federal road, state road etc.) with the data of the survey administrations. The accident coordinate is then displayed as a point on the corresponding road section. Data that does not meet the requirements will be sorted out and not presented in the accident atlas. The rates for a successful assignment of an accident coordinate to a road section are usually well above 90 % in the individual federal states.How are the accident data shown in the accident atlas?Overview representations up to a map scale of 1:100,000 show the accident events only on motorways and federal roads. The length of the road sections on which the individual accident events are combined is usually five kilometers.From a scale of 1: 100,000 changes the view to a detailed view. Here, the streets of all classes are depicted. The length of the road sections is usually 250 meters. Smaller sections may occur near intersections or at the end of roads.The change from the overview to the detail view also changes the colouring of the individual sections of the road. Due to the smaller section lengths, the number of accident events per road section is also lower. If zoomed further into the map, from a scale of 1:50,000, the individual accident events will appear as points above the respective road section to which they were assigned.