Most Dangerous US Cities for Pedestrians
Phoenix and Dallas had the highest per capita pedestrian fatality rate among the 10 largest US cities in 2016, as shown in this bar-mekko chart. Chicago and New York were significantly safer for pedestrians, according to data provided by the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration (NHSTA). Pedestrian fatalities per 100,000 in population varied from a high of 5.6 in Phoenix to lows of 1.6 and 1.5 in New York and Chicago.
The bar mekko chart below shows the fatality rates as the bar height and the city population as the bar width, allowing for comparison along both dimensions. The data rows enumerate both the city population and the total number of pedestrian fatalities in each city in 2016.
Bar Mekko Chart of Pedestrian Fatalities with Data Rows
How I Created This Pedestrian Fatality Bar Mekko Chart with Data Rows
Here are the steps to make this chart:- copy data from NHTSA report into an Excel spreadsheet (optional: use pdftables)
- create bar-Mekko chart (in either Excel or, PowerPoint) based on the data
- use Switch Bars and Series option to treat the columnar data as series and the rows as bars
- open Bars and Series dialog to eliminate some columns that were in pdf table from chart
- set population column as bar-width
- add column to divide population numbers by 1,000,000 to show in data row
- show calculated population with M suffix and total pedestrian fatalities as data rows
- sort bars from highest to lowest
- adjust chart margins and resize labels
