- 1). Contact your local or state police department. If, for example, you are requesting information about a specific car accident, the police department with jurisdiction should have first-hand knowledge of the traffic accident details. You can ask how to obtain the police accident report and find out the name of the hospital if any injured persons were taken by ambulance.
- 2). Review the local newspaper if a serious car accident happened. If serious injuries or a fatality occurred, the newspaper may find the accident newsworthy. You may also find the same article through the newspaper's website.
- 3). Visit the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration website. The NHTSA secures its data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System. Multiple charts and graphs featuring comprehensive data for motor vehicle accidents involving fatalities from 1994 through 2008 are available on the NHTSA website. You can review crash data including types of persons involved to fatalities per population and miles traveled. NHTSA also provides crash data by state.
- 4). Go to the U.S. Census Bureau website for a companion statistical chart on motor vehicle accidents with fatalities from 1980 to 2007. The Census Bureau also obtains its information from FARS. The chart gives figures for many categories of fatalities including drivers and passengers, ages of victims, types of vehicles including motorcycles and accidents involving driving under the influence.
- 5). Visit the Car-accidents.com website (see Resources) for a variety of traffic accident statistics. For instance, information reported from 1999 to 2000 gives a statistical comparison of persons killed in crashes versus those that used restraints and survived. The data also provides a comparison of male to female drivers. Seventy-three percent of all car accident fatalities are male. Statistical data for deer collisions also is available. Pennsylvania is the leading state for deer accidents, according to an insurance claims study completed from 2004 to 2005 and reported on Car-accidents.com.
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