Two-car motor vehicle accident at Ellicott and Swan

There seems to be a lot of accidents and inept drivers in Batavia. How does anyone get into an accident in a town (oops, city) that has so many traffic lights, its own roundabout and what I consider to be light traffic flow?

If anyone here thinks that Batavia has a traffic problem and has trouble navigating through it, they need to get out more and see some real traffic. I'm not talking about Buffalo or Rochester traffic, either. Those are nothing compared to the corridor from Gary, IN to Joliet, IL with its heavy big rig traffic or traversing any of the clusterflops around NYC or L.A..

C'mon, people, you make yourselves look really bad when you can't handle Batavia traffic!

I can't imagine there are any more accidents here than in other places.

Howard, there seems to be accidents reported here every day. Batavia just isn't that big of a place and the people driving in it are more than likely familiar with the streets they're driving on. Wouldn't it be fair to think that there would be fewer accidents on familiar turf?

I see what you're saying Doug, driving around Batavia is a piece of cake compared to say the east coast corridor from NY to DC. The problem just may be the lightness of traffic and familiarity of the area, drivers might not be paying as much attention as they ought to. I forget the actual statistic, but most accidents, by far happen within 5 miles of a person's home. Familiarity breeds contempt.

Doug, there are accidents reported here nearly every day because we report all but the most minor of accidents (and in the city, we report minor accidents that we don't necessarily report of the same minorness in a town). There's no statistical validity to judging whether there are more accidents in Batavia based on what's reported on The Batavian. We're not a traditional news organization. We take a very different, and sometimes more granular, approach to news.

And that seems to be a big part of why people love the site.

To put it another way, I bet you the same ratio of accidents to population density can be found in Medina, Perry or Geneso, but since there's no web site in those communities, that sort of provides real-time news of even minor incidents, it's as if the accidents never happened (except for the couple of people involved in each).

Here's the thought process that goes into whether an accident gets reported here:

-- Is either Billie or I listening to the scanner at the particular time the accident is first reported (contrary to popular myth, we don't listen to the scanner 24/7), so we do miss things;
-- Are their injuries?
-- If there are injuries, how serious does it sound?
-- If it sounds fairly serious, and especially if Mercy Flight is involved, we pretty much always report it;
-- If it's minor injuries, where did it occur and is it blocking traffic are two factors that get considered?
-- If the accident is in the city, especially on Main Street, and it is blocking traffic, regardless of injuries, we try to report it. The same can apply to the villages.
-- Sometimes a very minor accident can get elevated to post-worthy because of other factors, such as, the driver ran from the car, or an interesting commercial vehicle was involved (such as a dump truck), or weather played an unusual factor, etc.

We generally don't report car vs. deer, unless there are injuries (there are days we'd have 20 car vs. deer posts, if we did ... sort of like, we no longer report every smoke alarm that goes off at College Village -- it just gets ridiculous eventually).

So hopefully, that explains why it might seem like there are an unusual number of accidents, but there isn't really.

And I should point out, a traditional news organization generally only asks, "are the injuries serious or is there some other unusual factor?"

If a no answer is produced, then the accident is ignored, at least until and unless a law enforcement agency puts out a report.