Why it lasts

Sustainability & governance

accidents.sg is a not-for-profit public utility. It is free at the point of use, self-funded, and built so that it stays cheap to run and possible to inherit. This page is the honest account of how.

Self-funded, free to use

The project is funded by its maintainer, not by advertising, data resale, or a grant with strings attached. There is nothing to buy and no account to create. That is a deliberate choice: a neutral public record earns trust by not being shaped to a paying customer’s agenda.

Self-funding has a consequence — cost discipline is a design constraint, not an afterthought. The running cost has to stay small enough for one person to carry indefinitely, so the architecture is built to keep it that way.

What keeps it cheap

The public site is mostly reads, so the expensive work is done once and reused rather than recomputed per visitor:

cached readsPublic API responses carry an ETag tied to the data version and long cache lifetimes, so most page loads are served from the CDN and never touch the database.

precomputed mapThe road heatmap is rebuilt on a schedule into a static snapshot, instead of running geospatial aggregation on every request.

bounded queriesEvery query is capped by a coverage window and a row limit, so no single request can pull the whole history or run unboundedly.

modest collectorA small job polls the LTA feed every five minutes and stores only what changed. The ongoing write load is tiny by construction.

The maintainer monitors database usage so the running cost stays known and bounded. If the numbers ever grow beyond what self-funding can carry, the response will be to cut cost or be transparent about it — never to compromise the “free and honest” stance.

Open data, and a plan for the bus factor

The upstream source is public: LTA’s DataMall TrafficIncidents feed, under the Singapore Open Data Licence. This site adds structure, provenance, and honesty guards on top of that public record — it does not lock away a proprietary dataset.

The whole pipeline is reproducible and version-controlled: the collector, the database schema, and the reconciliation logic are all in the open, so the project can be rebuilt from its source and the public feed. That is what makes it inheritable — if the current maintainer steps away, someone else can pick it up rather than starting from nothing.

A public export of the aggregated data is on the roadmap, but it is gated on a review of what the Singapore Open Data Licence permits us to redistribute. Until that review is done, this page will not pretend an export exists.

Impact log

This is where the project records where its data has been cited, or has surfaced a pattern worth acting on. It is deliberately empty until there is something real to put here. We would rather show nothing than inflate impact — the same honesty rule that governs the map governs this log.

No citations or interventions recorded yet. If you have used accidents.sg in reporting, research, or advocacy, that is exactly what belongs here.

What this project will not do

To stay durable and trustworthy, some doors stay closed on purpose: no advertising or data resale; no severity, injury, or “danger” scores the feed cannot support; and no language that turns a count of reported incidents into a claim about risk. The methodology explains those limits in full.