It’s an interesting contrast if you step back and think about it – two recent lists look at how Alabama’s largest city handles its ever-growing traffic situation with differing messages.
This morning the Birmingham Business Journal shared information courtesy of a new report by their company’s in-house data investigation unit, On Numbers, that ranked Birmingham 347 out of 373 metro areas in terms of traffic congestion.
The city did finish faring better off than Dallas-Fort Worth, TX (358); Orlando, FL (359); Miami, FL (364); Houston, TX (367); and Atlanta, GA (372).
While it appears that you’ll be on the road for a while attempting to get to and from work, it’s also true that the city sees less accidents occur involving drivers under the influence. It’s not necessarily great news when you consider it’s still considered a cause for 13.6% of fatal crashes involving alcohol, regardless of population size, between 2000-2010. It was good enough though for John Nelson of IDV Solutions‘ UX Blog to recognize it had the lowest percentage of such fatalities among cities across the nation.
The black circle on the image up above helps you identify metro Birmingham on the map.
He published the data as part of providing a more exhaustive explanation of the findings he used to create an interactive map just before New Year’s Eve. Folks are getting a chance to dig into the data a little deeper courtesy of a post made yesterday to The Atlantic Cities.
It’s interesting when looked at in conjunction with the census tract data visuals we wrote about yesterday…
One can hope that most people will in fact ride their bikes to 
Why not ask Brian – or at least check out his blog posts. We noticed a great deal of interest from our newsletter subscribers when we included his blog, 
