[yochannah]

Nervous first post, probably mostly of interest to UK dwellers. This tool allows you to type in a UK place name and view traffic accidents in the area using the most recent data available from the UK government.

Sloppy source here: https://github.com/yochannah/trafficuk

Uses firebase for data loading and initial project scaffolding, google's geocoding api for location search, a couple of icomoon icons for markers.

Known thing: performance is a nightmare in London. Not sure how to handle the heavy traffic problems in london, so I'm defaulting to a really close zoom. Doesn't seem too problematic in the rest of the country.

Tested in chrome and ff on a macbook pro - would welcome feedback from other oses/browsers.

[brudgers]

The density/zoom concern might be addressed by some sort of geospatial aggregation...roughly the equivalent to indexes on a database...a 'denormalization'. Certainly an interesting problem for any online mapping app.

Good luck.

[yochannah]

That's a good idea, thanks! I was lying in bed thinking about this last night, as you do. MGRS coordinates might work well here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_grid_reference_system for higher zoom levels, then heatmap colour the grid 'squares' with an aggregate sum of accidents, and only add lat/long markers when I get to closer zoom.

[brudgers]

At coarse grain, the the coloring could probably be cached and only rerendered on a 'wall calendar' timescale.