Summary

Approximately 8.2 million people live within the five boroughs that make up New York City. Every year, thousands of accidents occur due to a multitude of contributing factors. NYPD collects information about each of those accidents and provides it for public use on nycopendata.socrata.com. We decided to explore the crash data to see if there were any underlying trends and relationships that could explain the number of accidents occurring. The data contained over 600,000 observations from July 2012 to July 2015. We chose to exclude August 2015 data, given we didn’t have the full month of data.

Initial Questions + Hypothesis

Before exploring the data, we created a list of questions we wanted to address:

*Is there a relationship between the time of day and the contributing factors of the accident?

*How does location influence the number of accidents occurring?

*Is there a trend in the number of accidents?

We also wanted to see if our hypothesis of “more alcohol related incidents occur between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m.” was valid. All of these questions and our hypothesis are addressed in the writeup below. First, here's the viz for you to explore: