As school gets back into session and council prepares to return from summer recess, Berkeleyside has taken a close look at a full year of injury-crash data from the Berkeley Police Department.
Click the rectangle in the upper left corner of each map for a legend
Our goal was to see what trends might emerge, continuing an effort we began before the pandemic to shed more light on pedestrian and cyclist injury crashes in Berkeley. We also wanted to make this data, which can be tough to procure, available to the public, in both clean and raw form.
Let us be the first to say: There is much more work to do. We’ll provide the source materials below for fellow data hounds who would like to delve deeper into the numbers themselves.
It’s also worth noting that, since the last time we looked, there has been a significant improvement in the BPD data that makes it easier to understand. For the first time since Berkeleyside began reviewing these reports, BPD has categorized the apparent injury severity level, from minor to moderate to serious. We excluded the handful of minor-injury crashes from our analysis.
In 2021, there were five fatal collisions involving pedestrians and none involving cyclists (although one cyclist died after experiencing a medical emergency while riding in West Berkeley).
According to the BPD data, 145 people sustained moderate or serious injuries in 141 collisions in 2021. Aside from fatalities, the injury numbers were down significantly from 2019.
There were nearly 800 collisions in total in Berkeley in 2021, according to the BPD dataset, but 625 of them involved vehicles only and were not part of this analysis.
Out of 57 pedestrian-related injury crashes, failure to yield to a pedestrian was the most common crash factor, while unsafe speed was the biggest factor in crashes involving cyclists.
BPD found the driver at fault in 84% of the crashes involving pedestrians, while pedestrians were deemed at fault in 11%.
Collisions involving cyclists were slightly more complicated. Out of the 57 crashes involving cyclists and a driver or pedestrian (there was just one), BPD found the fault pretty closely split. Another 25 crashes involved solo cyclists.
In the maps above, the color of the icon denotes who was at fault, according to BPD: If the marker is yellow, the driver was at fault. A blue marker means the pedestrian or cyclist was deemed at fault. If the marker was another color, click on it to learn more.
Each brief incident report also includes what BPD determined to have been the collision offense type (an umbrella term) along with the primary collision factor, or the main reason for the crash.
The snapshots also include any other available information such as the collision type (e.g. hit-and-run injury crash, fatality or DUI injury), how many people were injured or killed, and where and when the incident took place.
Markers also have the case number and a link to Berkeleyside coverage if we wrote about the crash. We also included what BPD shared about the age and gender of the at-fault party.
If you’d like to see how the collisions look against the city’s council districts, click the rectangle in the upper left corner of the map for a legend, and then tick the toggle box to turn on the council districts layer.
Get the data
- Cyclist collision data
- Pedestrian collision data
- Berkeleyside cleaned data (Excel file)
- BPD raw data (Excel file)
More resources
Want to dig deeper into traffic safety data? Check out these resources.
- The Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System (California Highway Patrol)
- An interactive website called Street Story (via UC Berkeley’s SafeTREC)
- Transportation Injury Mapping System (also via SafeTREC)