About Fatal Roads

Last checked against the NHTSA pages: 2 Oct 2026

Fatal Roads is a set of tables about deaths in road crashes. It gives the counts that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) records for 3,141 counties, 51 states and 2,253 signed routes. The years run from 1975 to 2024.

The purpose is to let a reader find the count for one place, see the year and the file it rests on, and cite it. Each page names the FARS file that it uses. This edition rests on the FARS 2024 annual file.

Who uses it

• A resident, a reporter or a local official who wants the count of a county and the change over ten years.
• A person who wants the count of one highway in one state.
• A researcher who wants the rows as a CSV file.

What it leaves out

• One crash. NHTSA keeps a record for each crash. This site keeps totals. It has no page for one crash, no date with a place, no name, no age and no photograph.
• Small counts. A count of 1 or 2 is written "1 or 2", and it has no rate.
• Rank. A table of named places is in name order. No page puts a county, a state or a route above another.
• Cause. A factor in a table is a factor that NHTSA records. It is not the cause of a crash, and the site does not say who was responsible.
• Advice. The site does not tell a reader how to drive, where to drive or what to buy.
• Crashes with no death. FARS does not hold them.
• Puerto Rico. FARS holds it, and this site does not.

How the pages are made

A program reads the FARS files, the population estimates of the Census Bureau and the vehicle-mile tables of the Federal Highway Administration. It writes each page from these figures with fixed sentences. The same fact has the same words on every page, and the same files always give the same text.

No generative AI runs when the site is built. The program runs again when NHTSA releases a new year or revises a year. The page How the figures are made gives the rules.

The sentence rules, the guides, the glossary and the pages about the site were written with an AI writing tool. Zippie is responsible for them. The date on each of these pages is the date of its last check against the agency pages.

How the site is paid for

The site is free to read. Zippie pays for it. No page shows an advertisement or a sponsor line today.

An advertisement, if the site shows one, has a label. A county page can have one sponsor line, also with a label. No advertiser or sponsor chooses a figure, changes a figure or sees a page before it is published.

Who publishes it

Zippie publishes Fatal Roads. The site is not a part of NHTSA, the Department of Transportation, the Census Bureau or the Federal Highway Administration. These agencies do not endorse it.

Errors

If a figure here is not the figure in the FARS file, the error is ours. The page Corrections says how to report it. The page Contact has the address.

Privacy

Fatal Roads counts how often its pages are opened, with Vercel Web Analytics.

The service sets no cookie, stores no data in the browser, builds no visitor profile and does not follow a visitor to other sites.

Vercel Inc. processes data about each visit: page address, referring page, browser and device type, operating system and city.

Vercel serves the files of the site and writes the usual server logs.

A watch list and a theme choice stay in the local storage of the browser and never reach Fatal Roads.