The program collects data for analysis of traffic safety crashes to identify problems, and evaluate countermeasures leading to reducing injuries and property damage resulting from motor vehicle crashes. The FARS dataset contains descriptions, in standard format, of each fatal crash reported. To qualify for inclusion, a crash must involve a motor vehicle traveling a traffic-way customarily open to the public and resulting in the death of a person (occupant of a vehicle or a non-motorist) within 30 days of the crash. Each crash has more than 100 coded data elements that characterize the crash, the vehicles, and the people involved. The specific data elements may be changed slightly each year to conform to the changing user needs, vehicle characteristics and highway safety emphasis areas. The type of information that FARS, a major application, processes is therefore motor vehicle crash data.

Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) was created in the United States by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to provide an overall measure of highway safety, to help suggest solutions, and to help provide an objective basis to evaluate the effectiveness of motor vehicle safety standards and highway safety programs.

FARS contains data on a census of fatal traffic crashes within the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. To be included in FARS, a crash must involve a motor vehicle traveling on a trafficway customarily open to the public and result in the death of a person (occupant of a vehicle or a non-occupant) within 30 days of the crash. FARS has been operational since 1975 and has collected information on over 989,451 motor vehicle fatalities and collects information on over 100 different coded data elements that characterizes the crash, the vehicle, and the people involved.

FARS is vital to the mission of NHTSA to reduce the number of motor vehicle crashes and deaths on our nation's highways, and subsequently, reduce the associated economic loss to society resulting from those motor vehicle crashes and fatalities. FARS data is critical to understanding the characteristics of the environment, trafficway, vehicles, and persons involved in the crash.

NHTSA has a cooperative agreement with an agency in each state government to provide information in a standard format on fatal crashes in the state. Data is collected, coded and submitted into a micro-computer data system and transmitted to Washington, D.C. Quarterly files are produced for analytical purposes to study trends and evaluate the effectiveness highway safety programs.

Content

There are 40 separate data tables. You can find the manual, which is too large to reprint in this space, here.

Querying BigQuery tables

You can use the BigQuery Python client library to query tables in this dataset in Kernels. Note that methods available in Kernels are limited to querying data. Tables are at bigquery-public-data.nhtsa_traffic_fatalities.[TABLENAME]. Fork this kernel to get started.

Acknowledgements

This dataset was provided by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) 2022 Initial Release - Fatal Motor Vehicle Accidents Auxiliary File dataset was compiled from January 1, 2022 to December 31, 2022 by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT)/Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) National Transportation Atlas Database (NTAD). This file contain elements derived from the FARS datasets to make it easier to extract certain data classifications and topical areas. This file downloaded from the open data catalog is synonymous with what USDOT/NHTSA releases for FARS as the ACC_AUX file.

The Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) 2021 Final Release - Vehicle Information Auxiliary File dataset was compiled from January 1, 2021 to December 31, 2021 by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT)/Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) National Transportation Atlas Database (NTAD). The final release data is published 12-15 months after the initial release of FARS, and could contain additional fatal accidents due to the delay in police reporting, toxicology reports, etc., along with changes to attribute information for previously reported fatal accidents. This file contain elements derived from the FARS datasets to make it easier to extract certain data classifications and topical areas. This file downloaded from the open data catalog is synonymous with what USDOT/NHTSA releases for FARS as the VEH_AUX file.

The Fataility Analysis Reporting System (FARS) dataset is as of July 1, 2017, and is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT)/Bureau of Transportation Statistics's (BTS's) National Transportation Atlas Database (NTAD). One of the primary objectives of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is to reduce the staggering human toll and property damage that motor vehicle traffic crashes impose on our society. FARS is a census of fatal motor vehicle crashes with a set of data files documenting all qualifying fatalities that occurred within the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico since 1975. To qualify as a FARS case, the crash had to involve a motor vehicle traveling on a trafficway customarily open to the public, and must have resulted in the death of a motorist or a non-motorist within 30 days of the crash. This data file contains information about crash characteristics and environmental conditions at the time of the crash. There is one record per crash. Please note: 207 records in this database were geocoded to latitude and logtitude of 0,0 due to lack of location information or errors in the reported locations. FARS data are made available to the public in Statistical Analysis System (SAS) data files as well as Database Files (DBF). Over the years changes have been made to the type of data collected and the way the data are presented in the SAS data files. Some data elements have been dropped and new ones added, coding of individual data elements has changed, and new SAS data files have been created. Coding changes and the years for which individual data items are available are shown in the “Data Element Definitions and Codes” section of this document. The FARS Coding and Editing Manual contains a detailed description of each SAS data elements including coding instructions and attribute definitions. The Coding Manual is published for each year of data collection. Years 2001 to current are available at: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Cats/listpublications.aspx?Id=J&ShowBy=DocType Note: In this manual the word vehicle means in-transport motor vehicle unless otherwise noted.

The State Traffic Safety Information (STSI) portal is part of the larger Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) Encyclopedia. STSI provides state-by-state traffic safety profiles, including: crash data, lives saved/savable, legislation, economic costs, grant funding, alcohol related crash data, performance measures, and geographic maps of crash data.

Contains data on large trucks and buses involved in Federally reportable crashes as per Title 49 U.S.C. Part 390.5 (crashes involving a commercial motor vehicle, and that either involve a fatalities, injury requiring treatmentaway from the scene of the crash, or a tow-away due to disabling damage). This information is reported by the States to FMCSA.

Objective: The objective of active safety systems is to prevent or mitigate collisions. A critical component in the design of active safety systems is the identification of the target population for a proposed system. The target population for an active safety system is that set of crashes that a proposed system could prevent or mitigate. Target crashes have scenarios in which the sensors and algorithms would likely activate. For example, the rear-end crash scenario, where the front of one vehicle contacts another vehicle traveling in the same direction and in the same lane as the striking vehicle, is one scenario for which forward collision warning (FCW) would be most effective in mitigating or preventing. This article presents a novel set of precrash scenarios based on coded variables from NHTSA's nationally representative crash databases in the United States.Methods: Using 4 databases (National Automotive Sampling System–General Estimates System [NASS-GES], NASS Crashworthiness Data System [NASS-CDS], Fatality Analysis Reporting System [FARS], and National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey [NMVCCS]) the scenarios developed in this study can be used to quantify the number of police-reported crashes, seriously injured occupants, and fatalities that are applicable to proposed active safety systems. In this article, we use the precrash scenarios to identify the target populations for FCW, pedestrian crash avoidance systems (PCAS), lane departure warning (LDW), and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) or vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) systems. Crash scenarios were derived using precrash variables (critical event, accident type, precrash movement) present in all 4 data sources.Results and Conclusions: This study found that these active safety systems could potentially mitigate approximately 1 in 5 of all severity and serious injury crashes in the United States and 26 percent of fatal crashes. Annually, this corresponds to 1.2 million all severity, 14,353 serious injury (MAIS 3+), and 7412 fatal crashes. In addition, we provide the source code for the crash scenarios as an appendix (see online supplement) to this article so that researchers can use the crash scenarios in future research.

The Fataility Analysis Reporting System (FARS) dataset is as of July 1, 2017, and is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT)/Bureau of Transportation Statistics's (BTS's) National Transportation Atlas Database (NTAD). One of the primary objectives of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is to reduce the staggering human toll and property damage that motor vehicle traffic crashes impose on our society. FARS is a census of fatal motor vehicle crashes with a set of data files documenting all qualifying fatalities that occurred within the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico since 1975. To qualify as a FARS case, the crash had to involve a motor vehicle traveling on a trafficway customarily open to the public, and must have resulted in the death of a motorist or a non-motorist within 30 days of the crash. This data file contains information about crash characteristics and environmental conditions at the time of the crash. There is one record per crash. Please note: 207 records in this database were geocoded to latitude and logtitude of 0,0 due to lack of location information or errors in the reported locations. FARS data are made available to the public in Statistical Analysis System (SAS) data files as well as Database Files (DBF). Over the years changes have been made to the type of data collected and the way the data are presented in the SAS data files. Some data elements have been dropped and new ones added, coding of individual data elements has changed, and new SAS data files have been created. Coding changes and the years for which individual data items are available are shown in the “Data Element Definitions and Codes” section of this document. The FARS Coding and Editing Manual contains a detailed description of each SAS data elements including coding instructions and attribute definitions. The Coding Manual is published for each year of data collection. Years 2001 to current are available at: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Cats/listpublications.aspx?Id=J&ShowBy=DocType Note: In this manual the word vehicle means in-transport motor vehicle unless otherwise noted.

The Fataility Analysis Reporting System (FARS) dataset is as of July 1, 2017, and is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT)/Bureau of Transportation Statistics's (BTS's) National Transportation Atlas Database (NTAD). One of the primary objectives of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is to reduce the staggering human toll and property damage that motor vehicle traffic crashes impose on our society. FARS is a census of fatal motor vehicle crashes with a set of data files documenting all qualifying fatalities that occurred within the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico since 1975. To qualify as a FARS case, the crash had to involve a motor vehicle traveling on a trafficway customarily open to the public, and must have resulted in the death of a motorist or a non-motorist within 30 days of the crash. This data file contains information about crash characteristics and environmental conditions at the time of the crash. There is one record per crash. Please note: 207 records in this database were geocoded to latitude and logtitude of 0,0 due to lack of location information or errors in the reported locations. FARS data are made available to the public in Statistical Analysis System (SAS) data files as well as Database Files (DBF). Over the years changes have been made to the type of data collected and the way the data are presented in the SAS data files. Some data elements have been dropped and new ones added, coding of individual data elements has changed, and new SAS data files have been created. Coding changes and the years for which individual data items are available are shown in the “Data Element Definitions and Codes” section of this document. The FARS Coding and Editing Manual contains a detailed description of each SAS data elements including coding instructions and attribute definitions. The Coding Manual is published for each year of data collection. Years 2001 to current are available at: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Cats/listpublications.aspx?Id=J&ShowBy=DocType Note: In this manual the word vehicle means in-transport motor vehicle unless otherwise noted.