On bicycle accidents and furry pornography

A few days ago, the Belgian newspaper de standaard published this map depicting the number of bicyle accidents per community in Flanders.



 When I saw the map I quickly had to think of this XKCD comic:

Yes, logically most accidents happen in communes with a large population. Normalizing by population seems a sensible thing to do.

Luckily, the map is just a google fusion table, so it was easy grab the data , join some population data to it, and finally make a new map showing the number of accidents per 10.000 inhabitants.

I could have been just be lazy and publish the data on google fusion tables again, but since I've had plans for a while to get more experience using javascript mapping libraries (leaflet, d3, topojson) I gave it a try:


Building this map was very easy. I combined the data using saga gis, converted to topojson using the node scripts. Then I took the very nice interactive chloropleth map from leaflet, changed the datasource, updated the class breaks and colors and finally update the legend.