The fast street concentrates deaths

• Crashes are placed correctly on the street, though by address

  Half of the 209,861 recorded crashes are 0.1 m or less from the road centerline, and in 97.4% the segment the record declares is the nearest one. But the points were located from the address, not at the exact site of the event: they serve to compare streets and zones, not to study a corner with meter-level precision.

• Roads with a 60 km/h limit have almost seven times as many fatal crashes

  Roads with a 60 km/h limit record 16.24 fatal crashes a year per 100 km of road, against 2.38 on 30 km/h roads. Each kilometer of fast road weighs almost seven times as much in fatal crashes as one of slow road.

• In strata 1 to 3, housing far from services is more often vacant

  In stratum 2, housing in the areas with the least proximity has a 6.1% vacancy rate, and in the areas with the most proximity, 2.3%. In strata 1 to 3, closeness to everyday life is associated with housing being occupied; in strata 4 to 6 vacancy is high at every level of proximity, so other factors weigh there.

• Bogotá has many neighborhood centers, besides its downtown

  669 cells of 250 m hold 36.6% of the city’s retail units, and 16.4% of the population lives in them: they are neighborhood centers spread across the whole city. Service units are more concentrated, in the expanded center and the north.

• A few avenues account for most of the deaths

  AK 72 recorded 152 fatal crashes between 2015 and 2021, AK 86 recorded 91 and AK 30, 85. Per kilometer, the highest rates are on AC 17, DG 16, AC 26 Sur and Carrera 10, between 4.6 and 5.6 fatal crashes per 10 km a year.

• A pedestrian collision is eight times more likely to be fatal than a vehicle collision

  7.23% of pedestrian collisions are fatal; of collisions between vehicles, 0.86%. On Sundays, 2.22% of crashes are fatal, compared with about 1.5% on weekdays.

• The well-served city has vacant housing for about 112,000 people

  Proximity quintiles 4 and 5 had 36,854 vacant homes in 2018, 31.2% of the total. At the average household size, they could house about 112,000 people where services are already close.

Calm first the 60 km/h avenues with the most fatal crashes per kilometer, with priority for pedestrians, and steer housing policy toward occupying the vacant homes in quintiles 4 and 5 before building far from services.

Bogotá’s public data are enough to tell apart the streets that kill, the homes waiting to be occupied and the neighborhood centers that already exist.