At the end of the year, it is time for a review – and for the people who, with their actions, managed to change public conversations for the better. One of them is Martin Atanasov, the creator of the interactive map – Black Track“ – a project that visualizes serious road accidents in Bulgaria and turned dry statistics into a painfully clear picture.
“Black Track did not change the war on the roads, but it showed it”, Atanasov tells bTV. According to him, this is the greatest effect of the project – to make visible the scale of the problem, which for a long time remained hidden behind numbers and reports.
The map collects data on accidents and places them on an interactive platform, where red dots outline the most dangerous areas in the country. Thus, places with repeated serious accidents become clearly recognizable - not only for citizens, but also for institutions.
The institutional reaction
In the beginning, the project met with resistance. Even before its launch, Atanasov was faced with refusals from institutions to provide information. After the public presentation, however, the dynamics changed.
“The cooperation with the institutions was brief, but the effect came in a different way“, he says. Subsequently, the Ministry of Interior created its own interactive map of road accidents, and the State Agency for Road Safety began working on visualizations related to the condition of the road surface.
According to Atanasov, this is not “theft of an idea“, but a logical reaction to public pressure. “The cause is more important than the authorship. If this leads to better solutions and more safety, then it was worth it“, he says.