Full map
Crash with one or more injuries. 
Crash with no injuries.
Braylon Nelson is one of the sweetest kids you’ll ever meet. Like any other 2-year-old boy with an insatiable curiosity, he asks a million questions and loves stories. When I visited him, a 400-page book of fairy tales was on his bed near the medical equipment that helps him breathe and eat.
Braylon’s father was driving him home from daycare last year when a Ford F-150 crashed into their small Saturn SL2. Witnesses said the truck driver had been speeding during a dispute with another motorist, and police blamed the accident on road rage.
The Nelsons had nothing to do with the altercation, but Braylon was paralyzed from the neck down.
No other county in Texas has as many reported road-rage crashes as Bexar County. Police and sheriff’s deputies cited road rage as a contributing factor in 680 crashes from 2007 to 2011.
That’s according to a public database of every vehicle accident in the state. The information comes from police accident reports, known as CR-3 forms, and are compiled by the Texas Department of Transportation in a massive database called the Crash Records Information System.
The database tracks hundreds of details about each accident, and anyone can request this information from TxDOT. You can ask for specific locations or types of crashes, or request a copy of the entire database if you’re comfortable using spreadsheets or database managers. To get an idea of what kind of information is available, check out this TxDOT spreadsheet. Or you can read the annual reports of crash statistics published by TxDOT.
Why does Bexar County have so many road rage crashes? It’s unclear whether we have more angry drivers, or whether San Antonio police are more apt to cite road rage than officers in other jurisdictions.
When I met with police officials about these statistics, they said they couldn’t comment on the reporting practices in other cities. But about 12 years ago they recognized San Antonio had a growing problem with aggressive drivers, and police started a program in which officers drive in unmarked cars to catch speeders, tailgaters, and other unsafe motorists like the ones accused of paralyzing Braylon.
I’ve seen some crazy drivers in San Antonio, and when I was working on this story, it seemed like every day I saw someone driving like a maniac.
If you want to learn more about road rage, you can check out the data for yourself in this interactive map that shows crashes in your neighborhood. You can also download the raw numbers here.
The post Road rage in Texas: Find accidents in your neighborhood with this interactive map appeared first on John Tedesco.