A City Got Counted Twice, And 55 Crashes Landed In The Atlantic

I have 17,312 traffic reports from Metro Manila. The old version of this page said they cover 15 cities.

They cover 14. Here is how a city got counted twice.

The Letter That Broke

Parañaque has a squiggle over the n. Computers store that squiggle as two bytes. If a program reads those two bytes as if they were two separate letters, you get "Parañaque".

Which is exactly what happened, in 107 rows.

So the list of city names had "Parañaque" in it, and also "Parañaque". Count the different names and you get 15. Count the actual cities and you get 14.

Metro Manila has 17. Three never show up at all.

Then I Kept Looking

55 rows say the accident happened at latitude 0, longitude 0.

That spot is in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Africa. Put those 55 on a map without checking and you have 55 Manila car crashes in the sea.

138 rows have a time I cannot read. Some are blank. One says "22:55 PM", which is a 24-hour clock wearing a 12-hour hat. When I first converted the times, that row came out as hour 34. That is how I found it.

And two whole months — July and August 2020 — have nothing in them. Not zero crashes. Nobody posting.

The Big One

Half of every report — 50.4 out of 100 — is Quezon City.

Four cities hold 91.59 of every 100. Navotas has 3 reports in two and a half years.

Navotas is not the safest place in Manila. It is the least tweeted-about.

Because that is what this data really is: a record of what one Twitter account posted. Not a record of what happened on the roads. Once you see that, the whole thing reads differently.

But It Caught Something Nothing Else Could

On 15 March 2020, Metro Manila locked down.

Before that day: 28.24 reports on a normal day.

During lockdown: 3.12.

February had 775 reports. April had 11.

And it never really came back. By the end of the data in December, it was up to 10.74 a day — still 62.0 per cent below where it started.

Morning Is Worse Than Evening

I expected the evening rush to be the bad one. Everyone tired, everyone going home.

Wrong. 28.14 out of every 100 reports land between 6am and 10am. Only 19.98 land between 4pm and 8pm.

The worst single hour is 7am, with 1,354 reports.

And Then Lunch Happens

This one made me laugh.

1pm has 558 reports. That is 41.2 per cent of the 7am figure — a bigger drop than any hour of the afternoon or evening.

Everybody stops. Then it climbs straight back up: 3pm has 1,118.

Sunday is the same story stretched over a week. 13.15 reports on a Sunday against 27.79 on a Tuesday.

One Road

EDSA is a single road through Metro Manila. It holds 48.04 out of every 100 reports that name a place.

The single worst spot is EDSA Shaw Tunnel, with 306.

So What Is Actually True?

For that I need numbers somebody counted properly, for the whole country.

The World Health Organization does. 12.0 Filipinos per 100,000 die on the roads each year.

That is better than Thailand at 32.2, Vietnam at 30.6, Malaysia at 22.5. Third best of six countries in the region.

But here is the catch. In 2000 it was 9.8. So it went up 22.4 per cent.

Of the six countries, only 2 got worse. We are one of them.

A low number going up and a high number coming down are not the same problem. Thailand is fixing something. We are not.