About Fatal Roads
Fatal Roads publishes fatal motor-vehicle crash statistics for every county and state in the United States and for 2,213 signed routes, from 1975 to 2024, as recorded in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). Each figure is placed next to its state and the nation, turned into a rate per 100,000 residents using Census Bureau population estimates, and followed back over time, so a local number can be read in context.
Who it is for
Residents and commuters who want to know how their area compares; road-safety advocates and local officials; journalists covering a crash or a road; and insurance and personal-injury professionals researching an area. All of them are reading the same public files; this site adds the comparisons, rates and trends that the raw files do not offer.
What it leaves out
- Individual crashes. FARS records each crash with a date, location and the people involved. This site publishes aggregates only: no per-crash pages, no dates paired with coordinates, no names, no ages, no photographs. Counts below three are shown as a range.
- Rankings that assign fault. Routes are listed by the number of fatal crashes, which mostly reflects how long and busy they are. No road, county or driver population is labelled as at fault.
- Advice. The site reports what the files say. It does not recommend routes, vehicles or behaviour.
Who publishes it
Fatal Roads is an independent public-data reference site. It is not affiliated with NHTSA, the Department of Transportation or the Census Bureau, and none of them endorse it.
Funding
The site is free and funded by clearly labelled advertising and, where present, a labelled sponsor line on county pages. Advertisers and sponsors have no influence over which figures appear or how they are presented.
Updates and corrections
The site is rebuilt from the current FARS annual files and rebuilt again when NHTSA releases or revises a year. If a figure here differs from NHTSA's own tools, NHTSA is authoritative; the methodology explains where the two can differ and the corrections page explains how to report an error.
Contact: contact page.