This Developer is Spreading Road Safety Awareness, One City at a Time

More than a century after the first car was sold, road traffic injuries and deaths remain one of the most dangerous problems in the world. The CDC estimates about 3700 people may die every day around the world in car, truck, bus, motorcycle, bicycle, or pedestrian-related traffic accidents. Half of those killed are cyclists or pedestrians.

To confront this issue, Vision Zero, a road traffic safety initiative, started in Sweden in 1997 with the goal of reducing the road traffic-related fatalities and injuries. The project has had great success in Sweden, which now has one of the lowest annual road death rates in the world—despite an increase in overall traffic—and has inspired countries and cities all over the world to adopt Vision Zero initiatives.

One Washington, DC-based Glitch user, Daniel Schep, has taken action on this issue in his community.

“I've been coding since I was in middle school and biking longer than I can remember. Both are integral parts of who I am,” Daniel said in an interview with Glitch. “But unsurprisingly, coding has proven to be much more lucrative.”

An idea occurred to him “when Carlos Sanchez-Martin [an e-scooter rider] and Tom Hollowell [a cyclist] were killed within days of each other.” The idea was to take the classic “X days since last accident” sign and use it to show the frequency of traffic-related deaths. Zero Vision DC Clock keeps count of how recently a pedestrian or cyclist was fatally struck by a vehicle in DC. The counter increases on its own and when an accident occurs, Daniel updates the app with the deceased’s name and moves the counter back to zero.

One of the reasons that Daniel chose Glitch to host this project was because he wanted to let others make their own versions of his app.

“Remixability was 100% a goal...having as simple a code base as possible (no frameworks, just vanilla Javascript) and hosting on Glitch made it very easy for people to make their own versions for their cities,” Daniel explained. “The first remix was from a transportation planning student in Montgomery County right across the Maryland/DC line. The Boston remix came after the death of Dave Salovesh, a vocal bike [and] pedestrian safety advocate. This has led to lots of coverage and global calls to action.”

While Daniel finds it compelling that something simple he created something could be used by activists in different communities, to him “it’s mostly really sad that it's necessary.”