Car vs. building crashes in Buffalo mapped with Google's help

In December 2013, Buffalo, NY news station WVIB posted a gallery of 69 images of cars that had crashed into storefronts and homes entitled "Rash of vehicles crashing into buildings." In November 2012 the town of Amherst, NY - part of the Buffalo metro area - began looking at municipal regulations to place bollards in front of buildings to protect them from runaway cars. The Deputy Supervisor of the city said that at one time the area was averaging an astounding 13-17 cars-into-buildings crashes per month. In October 2011 there were several news reports questioning why there were so many such crashes in the area, an especially heavy bout of such incidents leading to a Google map marking their spots.

That 2011 map is positively sparse compared to the latest updated map that plots the more than 70 incidents since 2006 of cars, buses and trucks colliding with buildings. There is no predominant cause for the troubles, with drivers being young and old, healthy and ill, commercial and regular, sober and drunk and accidents taking place day and night - although one psychologist did suggest copy-cat motives had something to do with it. If anything good can be taken from it, it's that deaths have been few in comparison to the number of accidents.

If you're headed to Buffalo, or you live there and want to know where might be the hotspots to avoid, check out the latest cartography of carnage. Each incident links to the news report detailing how it got there.