Effects of Increasing the Speed Limit on Major Highways in BC

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Acquiring Data / Analyses / Cartography / Editing / Instructions / Parsing Data / Presenting Data / Visualization

July of 2014, the BC Liberal Government announced speed limit increases on dozens of highways comprised of 1,300 kilometers of roadways. Select stretches of highways were increased to a maximum speed of 120 km/h (making those stretches of highway the fastest in Canada) with a difference of up to 20 km/h, including the Connector and the Island Highway.

Effects of Increasing the Speed Limit on Major Highways in BC

 

Final Project report: GEOB 270 Final Project

 

Experience with the final project

July of 2014, the BC Liberal Government announced a wide slate of changes to 9,100 km of highways under provincial jurisdiction. The B.C. Transportation and Infrastructure Minister Todd Stone went as far to claim that the changes would actually help to improve mobility and safety of provincial highways, as studies have shown roadways are safest when the difference between the slowest and fastest cars is minimal. The goal of our project was to examine data from 2013-2016 of motor vehicular accidents in regions of BC to analyze if there was any correlation with the increase in speed limit and the number of accidents.

We organized the project by skill strengths, I took on the responsibility of acquiring data and building the maps because I felt confident in my map cartography skills. The report was edited by one of the group members that had a strong writing background. We divided up the project with equal amounts of work.

Project management was taken on by everyone in my group. When we were on a particular part of the project, for example, making the maps, I took on leadership, but when we were writing the report one of my other group members took lead and I followed. Letting other people lead certain parts of the project was beneficial for the cooperation of everyone.

Working on this project has made me realize open public data is not sufficient in making accurate maps. We used DataBC to acquire our data, but no information was available on where the accidents happened, or the cause of accidents. The lack of accurate and missing data has caused us to have an inconclusive assessment on whether there is a correlation with the increase in speed limits and the number of accidents recorded.

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Learning Significance

  1. For the final project, we used all the keys tools that all previous labs had introduced.

    Acquiring Data
    Parsing Data
    Merge polygons
    Build a multi-field query using the Select by Attribute tool
    Overlays of sperate maps
    Presenting data