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Fatal Road Accidents in Armenia
2023–2026

Interactive map · MIA of Armenia / Rescue Service data · Stepan Bazhov TG @stepany4

About the project

This map visualises every fatal road traffic accident (RTA) in Armenia reported by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Armenia and the Rescue Service between 2023 and 2026. Each marker represents one incident; colour encodes the year, and size encodes the number of fatalities.

The goal is to make public safety data accessible, searchable, and geographically legible — turning bureaucratic incident reports into a tool for research, journalism, and road-safety advocacy.

Methodology

  1. Data collection. The Telegram channel of the Armenian MIA Rescue Service (t.me/rescueam) was exported as a full archive covering 2023–2026. The channel publishes structured operational reports for every registered emergency, including road fatalities.
  2. Pre-processing. The raw Telegram export was converted into a clean, plain-text format suitable for AI ingestion — one incident per entry, preserving date, time, location description, vehicle types, and outcome. The resulting dataset was uploaded to Google NotebookLM as a source.
  3. Structured extraction. Claude Code — using a custom NotebookLM skill — queried the notebook to extract all fatal RTA records and generate the initial interactive map with approximate coordinates derived from the textual location descriptions.
  4. Location description export. For each incident, a textual description of the accident location (road name, kilometre marker, nearby settlement, landmark) was exported from the dataset to a working file.
  5. Manual geocoding. Each location was verified individually using satellite maps and street-level 3D panoramas. Kilometre markers on Armenian highways were cross-referenced against the road network to find the precise coordinates of each crash site.
  6. Coordinate refinement. The manually verified coordinates were fed back into Claude Code, which updated the map data point by point. All ~84 incidents were corrected through this iterative review process.
Limitations. Incident records reflect what was officially reported and published. Some entries lack precise timestamps or vehicle details. Coordinates for incidents described only by settlement name (without a kilometre marker) carry higher positional uncertainty. Two incidents share identical coordinates due to ambiguous location descriptions in the source data.

Data source

All incident data originates from public reports published by the Rescue Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Armenia on Telegram: t.me/rescueam.

Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors.

2024 Map version

The previous version of map from 2024 that has more manual labor involved is at public.flourish.studio/story/2193942. And source data for that you can find at docs.google.com.

Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors.

This project is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. You are free to share and adapt the data and visualisation with attribution. Source code is accesible at github.com/stepany4/fatal-road-accidents-armenia.