I recently qualified for my master’s degree, which took me 4 years plugging away at the rate of one unit per semester (with a couple of semesters off) while continuing full-time work. My degree is in project management, because I decided to make the most of my time to add to my professional qualifications as well. My undergrad degree from MANY years ago was in Anthropology. Some years ago I got a graduate diploma in Applied Finance, and I work in financial services and technology. So there were a few directions I could take. I considered master’s degrees in anthropology, sociology, history, technology and data science – as well as project management. I’ve been managing projects in one way or another for more than twenty years, and my day job is quite demanding, so in the end I decided it made sense to combine work and study to preserve some sanity and get an immediate practical benefit from the effort.
Anyway, one of the things I looked forward to in my degree was doing research, which I have always loved. Though I had initial ambitions to do a dissertation, I ended up abandoning that and taking the ‘professional’ stream instead (again, to preserve sanity while holding down a demanding job). For my final elective subject, I chose a subject on data research and storytelling, which I enjoyed immensely. As well as giving me some introduction and practice with SQL and Python and how to query large data sets, it gave us the opportunity to research and collate data into a data story, which we were encouraged to publish as open data and an online data story.
For my data story I chose to analyse the Victoria Road Crash Data for statistical correlations with increased harm to pedestrians and cyclists from the larger vehicles that are increasingly the norm on our roads – SUVs and large pickup trucks in particular.
I will not pretend I have come up with anything original here. Many media articles over the last few years have sounded the alarm on this trend. Covering this angle as a data story allowed me to practice data research and statistical queries and check my findings against trends that have been noted by others.
I am also not against large vehicles as such. I’m an SUV owner myself. But I admit to feeling some alarm at the proliferation of frankly massive pickup trucks on city and suburban streets and I can’t help but notice the worsening state of our roads that must be exacerbated by the growth in volume and size of our cars. Since working on this research, I have become very conscious of the blind spots I hadn’t fully appreciated around my own car, and it has made me more wary of them regarding pedestrians and cyclists. It has also helped me decide that my next car will be smaller.
So here is my data story, which includes links to open data sets I have shared in Zenodo.
And here is the open data behind the story:
Vehicle types and road crash impacts – Victoria, Australia 2012-2025
Registered Vehicles by Type – Victoria, Australia, 2016-2025
the non-project project 