Near Miss dashboard collects data from drivers and cyclists, provides an avenue to safer roads

by Ian Stewart, Virginia Mercury
September 15, 2025

Thomas King is used to cycling around Richmond. The Church Hill resident often rides on weekends and he also commutes by bike to his office a few miles away. He knows the best routes to take, what supplies to bring – such as spare tires – and now, he knows how to report almost-accidents on PlanRVA’s Near Miss Dashboard. 

On a recent Sunday after a ride near the University of Richmond, King almost collided with a driver. He was heading downhill on River Road going about 20 miles per hour. He was about to turn left back onto campus, when a driver also began to turn left out of the university.

“I had my arm out for like 200 yards, signaling that I was turning left into U of R Drive,” King said. “And as I was turning left, this guy starts turning into my body as I’m going.”

King said he either would have to go wide, which would make him go off the road and launch himself into the bushes.

“Or I hold the turn and pray that this guy doesn’t swipe my back wheel out and splatter me down the hillside,” he said. “I looked behind me as he did it and he missed my back wheel by less than six inches.”

However, that wasn’t King’s only near miss that day. In Westover Hills a driver made an illegal left turn to try to cut through a CVS parking lot.

“He just turned straight into me,” King said. “I had to launch my bike over to the side [to] not fall over. I was just like, ‘man, what is going on today? It’s like two near misses in one day.’”

Those two incidents led King to submit a report on PlanRVA’s Near Miss Dashboard. It’s the third time he’s logged his close calls in the new tool. 

PlanRVA’s goal is for the data they collect from their Near Miss map to be used to create safer streets for all users, according to Elizabeth Greenwell, a data analyst at PlanRVA who helped create the map. 

“A near miss is any event that does not result in an injury, but could have,” she said. “So for transportation planning, what we’re really looking at is those events that are unreported to the police. Something nearly happened or could have happened, but didn’t.”

Greenwell said the dashboard is a public engagement tool for safety in the region to crowdsource those “Near Miss” events, and particularly for bike and pedestrian transportation.

“A major thing that we want to come out of it is (to) take the data and provide our localities with information from the dashboard in a short report that would give them some hotspots of activity,” said Greenwell. “Maybe some analysis about what types of events are going on. Do they happen at crossings or what speeds are posted?”

PlanRVA’s map is still new in terms of the amount of data they’ve collected, said Greenwall, so they’re not quite ready to post any concrete findings just yet.

“Right now we have 184 responses, which feels like a lot considering it went live in March,” she said. “But I think we could get a lot more before we start getting into analysis with the data.”

Although it’s still relatively early in their data collection, they are already seeing some trends.

“These are extremely initial results, but a big thing is poor sightlines and poor visibility,” said Greenwell. “People don’t feel seen and that limits how safe they feel in a space. So that’s an interesting early takeaway.”

How it works

PlanRVA’s digital map includes nine localities in the Central Virginia region, from Hanover County and the Town of Ashland to New Kent and Charles City and everything in between. Once you’re on the map, you can zoom into exact street locations and drop a pin — that’s when the survey window pops up. 

“It’s going to ask you, ‘how are you traveling? Were you walking, biking, wheelchair, on a scooter, micromobility device, e-bike?’” said Greenwell. “Was it a near miss, a collision or did you witness this?”

PlanRVA’s mapping tool is based on similar near miss dashboards, such as BikeMaps and the Northern Virginia Families For Safe Streets, which have been in existence much longer. BikeMaps started in 2014, while Families for Safe Streets in NOVA started in 2017. Both are able to parse out the data into chunks of statistics, such as  the highest number of near misses during certain hours of the day or which days are busiest for near misses. 

The Families for Safe Streets dashboard has had time to hone their data to make it useful for area officials, said Mike Doyle, founder and executive director of the Northern Virginia Families for Safe Streets. He started the non-profit after being released from the hospital after a car crashed into him while he was driving his car.

“In Alexandria we work well with the transportation people,” Doyle said. “They’ll ask us, what is your data saying on such and such a road, because they want to make a proposal. It helps support improvements that are all safety focused.”

Greenwell at PlanRVA said they are hoping to collect more data in the future. 

“We’re expanding our data storage so that we can start accumulating multiple years worth of data as it grows,” Greenwell said. “I’m working on the dashboard page to have a heat map, (and) better map pop-ups on the existing map so that users can see those comments about the events recorded as they interact with the map.”

Greenwell said they’d also like to be able to analyze both bike and pedestrian count data, which is something that BikeWalkRVA does every year, because it would give them a clearer picture of how risky some roads are and hopefully prevent people from using it until the infrastructure is improved. 

For now, residents like King can keep sharing their near misses as the dashboards get up to speed and help bolster public safety.

“You have these traumatic experiences and you’re the only one who’s experienced it and you want to do something a little bit more than just tell your friends this crazy thing happened,” King said. “You hope someone will do something about it.”

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