About

A running, public record of pedestrian, cyclist, and scooter strikes — and corridor crashes — in Alexandria, Virginia, built from the city's own public dispatch audio.

What this is

Alexandria's official crash record only captures crashes that clear a statutory reporting threshold and generate a filed report. A lot of harm never makes it in — the pedestrian struck by a driver who then refuses medical transport, the close call on a sidewalk that shouldn't have been closed. But those calls still go out over public dispatch radio. This project listens to that radio, transcribes it, verifies what it finds, and maps it — so the gap between what dispatch hears and what the city officially counts is something you can see and click through, one incident at a time. The Methodology explains exactly how, and what it can and can't show.

Who runs it

I'm Elena Hutchison, a pedestrian- and cyclist-safety advocate in Alexandria. This is a personal civic-data project, built and maintained in my individual capacity. The findings and views here are mine alone — not those of DRCA, BPAC, NVFSS, or any other organization I work with. The Recommendations note where any organization holds a formal position.

Where it's headed

The point of this isn't to react to each individual incident — it's to build a months-long, cumulative record that reveals patterns the sparse official data can't. The longer-term plan is to hand the monthly screening off to Northern Virginia Families for Safe Streets (NVFSS) so it outlives any one person's spare hours, and to feed verified, fully-contextualized events into Alexandria's Vision Zero reporting. I'm at NVFSS's service to make that happen.

Open by design

The credibility of this work rests partly on being inspectable. The tool that gathers the data is open source at dispatch-pedestrian-monitor, and the dataset behind the map is published in full on the Data page. If you're in another city and want to do the same thing, the pipeline is documented and adaptable.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or want to help? ecaudle@gmail.com.