Will you tell us what you want out of a revived Cycle Collision Tracker?

For years we hosted a Cycle Collision Tracker, where people could mark a spot on a map where they had a crash and fill in a form giving details of what happened.

As more people put in reports, the publicly visible dots on the map began to form clusters, flagging dangerous spots – which we reported on.

And, from the more detailed reports submitted to us, which weren’t made public because they included personal information, we spotted patterns, which we wrote about.

Unfortunately, in hopping from website to website, we’ve lost our old Cycle Collision Tracker. But I think it’s a useful project so I’m reviving it.

I asked ChatGPT to help me build a new system for reporting incidents, showing the dots on the map, and collecting detailed reports – and it did.

But before I simply take the easy route and re-launch exactly as we had it before, I wanted to check in with all of you and talk about it a bit.

Is a tool like this still useful, still needed? Should it be just the same as it was, or should we do it differently this time?

Should it be focused on cycle collisions? What about e-scooters? Pedestrians? Or cars, for that matter?

What information should we collect about each collision? Of that, what should be shown publicly on the map, and what should we keep to ourselves and only use for our reporting?

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Ideally, you’d join us on this WhatsApp group, where I’m trying to gather a few people over the next few days, before hosting a discussion about all this on Friday.

I’d be very happy, though, to hear from you through any means you’d like, from a comment on the bottom of this, to a message via social media, to an email to sam@dublininquirer.com or a phone call to 0873924797.