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 Final Release - Fatal Motor Vehicle Accidents 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 geospatial dataset is the accident file from the FARS 2022 Final Release Data. 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 data file contains information about crash characteristics and environmental conditions at the time of the crash. There is one record per crash. A data dictionary, or other source of attribute information, is accessible at https://doi.org/10.21949/1529018