CLEVELAND — Statistics from the Ohio State Highway Patrol show that you are more likely to be involved in a crash in Cuyahoga County than any other of its neighboring counties.
Those statistics are from a new database OSHP put online, giving the public access to crash data gathered from all confirmed crash reports from every agency dating to 2014.
While a bunch of numbers relating to crashes doesn't seem interesting at first, the data allows law enforcement or even the public the ability to analyze the data for specific crash trends.
Map users can sort through the data county-by-county or by the severity of the crashes reported—giving the viewer a way to look at specific information such as times, days or types of crashes that have occurred.
OSHP broke down the crash data into several categories available to view. They are:
- Commercial related
- Deer related
- Distracted related
- Mature (over 55) related
- Motorcycle related
- OVI related
- Pedestrian related
- Speed related
- Unbelted related
- Youth (between 14 and 24 years old) related
In Cuyahoga County alone, you're more likely to be involved in a crash on a Friday between 4 and 4:59 p.m. than any other day or time of the week. Numbers show that overall, the highest number of crashes happened during both morning and afternoon rush hours.
Crash statistics show there have been 23,189 crashes in Cuyahoga County between Jan. 1 and Oct. 28.
To put this in perspective, year to date numbers show neighboring counties have significantly fewer crashes.
Lorain County had 4,683 crashes; Medina County had 2,613; Summit County had 10,808; Geauga County had 1,410; Portage County had 2,624 and Lake County had 3,345 crashes.
Fatal crashes in Cuyahoga County occurred at a rate three times higher than Summit County, which had the second-highest number of crashes of any county neighboring Cuyahoga County.
Year to date, there have been a total of 56 fatal crashes in Cuyahoga County. The amount of serious injury crashes in the county is significantly higher—with nearly 500 serious injury crashes reported from Jan. 1 to Oct. 28.
Out of the 23,189 crashes in Cuyahoga County, 8,632 of them involved motorists over 55 years old. On the other hand, the number of crashes involving younger individuals between ages 15 and 24 years old was 6,612.
A closer look at those numbers shows that in the 8,632 crashes for people 55 years or older, 20 of those crashes were fatal. For crashes involving juveniles, 8 of the 6,612 crashes were fatal.
If we break down those numbers even further, out of the 6,612 crashes involving someone between 15 and 24-years-old, there were 1,303 crashes where individuals were was not wearing a seatbelt. On the flip side, there were 1,627 crashes involving adults who were not wearing a seatbelt.
The only category where Cuyahoga County didn't have the highest crash rate compared to a neighboring counties was in deer-related crashes.
Year to date, Cuyahoga County had 178 crashes involving deer. Neighboring Lorain County came in higher with 253 crashes. Statistics show that the highest number of crashes involving deer occurred between 5 and 7 a.m. and later on in the evening between 7 and 11:59 p.m. If you take a look at interactive map and select "crashes by severity," it shows that nearly all of the crashes in Lorain County involving deer happened on state routes or highways.
According to OSHP, the database will be updated weekly.
There's a multitude of uses for the database, with the most obvious being that law enforcement can quickly see areas in their jurisdictions where crashes happen and additional patrols are necessary. It also serves as a landing point or a catch-all website that any person or any agency needing up to date information can use to comb through crash data for any location in the state.
Anyone interested in looking at the database can click here to see it.
RELATED: Cuyahoga County ranks third-highest in the state for the pedestrian-related crashes
