SAN DIEGO (CNS) – The San Diego County Bike Coalition and Los Angeles-based mobility organization Streets for All are teaming up on a program to automatically report details of every accident involving a pedestrian and cyclist in San Diego in time real, officials said Tuesday.

The San Diego Crash Tracker will report crashes through an automated Twitter account operated by the Bike Coalition. The program pulls data from the Citizen app, which monitors police scanners and reports incidents in real time, to tweet approximate details and locations of crashes as they happen.

“After seeing this program report hang for only two weeks during our initial testing, I was shocked at the number of people hit by drivers on the streets of San Diego while walking or simply riding a bike. “, said Will Rhatigan, head of advocacy for the coalition. “We hope this program will help decision-makers understand road violence as the public crisis it has always been, and encourage them to begin installing road safety improvements with the urgency a crisis deserves.”

From 2016 to 2020, an average of more than 240 people walking and 80 people riding bikes were killed or seriously injured each year on the streets of San Diego County, the coalition said. Even though the city of San Diego took a big step by adopting Vision Zero in 2015 – a commitment to achieve zero road deaths by 2025 – cycling advocates say the speed at which roads are improved to security did not match the emergency.

“The Bike Coalition wants to emphasize that these constant accidents are preventable,” said San Diego Bike Coalition Executive Director Andy Hanshaw. “Other countries have reduced road rage deaths by 80 percent by reducing speed and installing a basic set of road safety devices. Leaders here in San Diego can and should install these devices on dangerous roads.”

Automated reporting is intended to increase the speed at which the community learns about accidents. Its creators said it also provides better data on crashes where no injuries are reported — crashes that aren’t typically tracked by government data.