California Highway Patrol bicycle incidents

The California Highway Patrol posts traffic incident dispatches to the web. A while ago I wrote a script to filter out incidents involving bikes or bicycles, and I finally modified this script to save each bike incident to a web page.

You'll see a few false positives involving motorcycles, and most of the 'bike incidents' seem to be either "1125 - Traffic Hazard" or "Pedestrian in Roadway" when a motorist reports a cyclist somewhere. Still, there are a fair number of "TC" (Traffic Collision) and "Ambulance Responding" incidents.

You can view the list of bike incidents here. If you want to follow this in (near) real time, each new incident is tweeted to @CHPBIKE on Twitter.

If you have suggestions on ways to improve this, I'm all ears. Already on my TODO list:

• Create separate monthly index pages.
  
• Hover over CHP "10 codes" and jargon so you can see what it means. For example, "XRAY" means "female"; 1097 just means they showed up; JSO = "Just South Of."
  
• Replace Dispatch Center code with English language. For example, OCCC is "Orange County."
  
• Instead of listing incident number in the link tag, I'll put the incident type so you can quickly ignore "Traffic Hazard" and "Pedestrian On Roadway" type incidents if you want to, instead of requiring you to link through.
  
• In addition to the Twitter feed, I might create an RSS feed as well (though the Twitter feed already has an RSS feed built in *shrug*.

It's important to note that this only captures incidents reported to the California Highway Patrol. Incidents handled by the local police, such as this morning's cycling fatality in Los Gatos, will not generally be visible here.