Athens-Clarke County transportation officials are creating a new online dashboard tracking car crashes, injuries and deaths.
Last year, 10 fatal crashes killed 14 people in Athens—a number exacerbated by a rash of deaths around Christmas. In one, a wrong-way driver on the Loop, 26-year-old Desiree Browning of Lawrenceville, hit a vehicle driven by Soonhoon Choi, 25, of Athens, killing herself and Choi. His wife, Sara Waldroup, and their unborn child later died from their injuries as well. 
That was just one of the 5,154 wrecks reported in Athens last year—an average of 14 per day. Of those, 1,248 resulted in a total of 1,801 injuries. 
Sixty-seven of those crashes involved pedestrians, and 43 involved bike riders. While that’s less than 2% of total crashes, that small number resulted in a quarter of overall deaths and serious, life-altering injuries (17 of 71).
According to a “heat map” of wrecks, they’re most common along wide, fast and busy streets like Lexington Road, West Broad Street, Highway 29 and North Avenue (where the Athens-Clarke County Commission turned down a $25 million federal safety grant rather than potentially inconvenience drivers by eliminating car lanes). For cyclists and pedestrians, downtown, North Campus and Prince Avenue are among the most dangerous areas, but as Bike and Pedestrian Coordinator Daniel Sizemore noted, “It’s more likely to see bike crashes where people are riding bikes.”
Despite last year’s three fatal crashes in December, they tend to decline during the holidays and over the summer, when many UGA students are out of town, then spike in the spring and especially in fall, possibly because of the number of football fans driving into town. 
Transportation and Public Works officials showed an unfinished version of the dashboard last week to Athens in Motion, a group that advises the Athens-Clarke County Mayor and Commission on transportation. The dashboard will let users filter results by mode of transportation, date range, severity of crash, type of road, lighting and weather conditions, time of day, school zone, commission district and possibly driver age.
“It’s going to be an amazing, powerful tool for the commission and the public, and useful for having conversations with officials and the public about countering some of these ideas that may or may not be true about where the wrecks are and what causes them,” Athens in Motion chair Lauren Blais said.In 2022 the commission passed a Vision Zero resolution setting a goal of zero traffic deaths by 2037. The previous year, fatalities hit an all-time high of 23, dropping to 11 in 2022, then rising again to 21 in 2023 and falling to 11 in 2024.
Like what you just read? Support Flagpole by making a donation today. Every dollar you give helps fund our ongoing mission to provide Athens with quality, independent journalism.

source