FARS

[ Check out Paul Schimek’s visualization of FARS bicycling data ]

Cindie Holub’s death on March 1,  (Cindy’s death was written up on bicyclelaw.com, also see 2010 fatalities), from injuries sustained in a Feb 24 collision with a garbage truck caused me to look up the rule for categorization purposes. “To be included in this census of crashes, a crash had to involve a motor vehicle traveling on a trafficway customarily open to the public, and must result in the death of a person (occupant of a vehicle or a nonmotorist) within 30 days of the crash.” from DOT HS 811 137.

The US DOT runs a very elaborate, publicly available, query-able database for every traffic fatality in the US called FARS — Fatality Analysis and Reporting System.

There is a web interface that leads the user through building a query, e.g. below is a tabular report for all State=4 (Arizona), and Person Type=6 or 7 (bicyclist or other cyclist) in 2008, 20 cases were found for 19 collisions (this is a slight discrepancy of the reported 19 figure in the official NHTSA state-by-state report).

some handy info can be gleaned, e.g. the gps coordinates for most incidents are listed, you can use google to map it, e.g. 32.81931389, -111.68361944 is the intersection of I-8 and I-10.
…

obs	Case#	Date	Hit&Run?	Latitude	Longitude	Road	Age
1	18	01122008	2	32.22082778	-110.78518056	BROADWAY BLVD	14
2	18	01122008	2	32.22082778	-110.78518056	BROADWAY BLVD	14
3	58	02122008	0	33.55228611	-112.22566389	NORTHERN AVE	46
4	79	02292008	0	32.16764444	-110.95620000	PARK AVE	43
5	255	04302008	0	33.58914444	-112.14539167	CHOLLA ST	5
6	284	05202008	0	32.31297500	-111.03741389	CAMINO DE LA TIERRA	43
7	463	07092008	2	33.53823889	-112.05129722	GLENDALE AVE	40
8	505	08132008	0	32.81931389	-111.68361944	I-10	50
9	506	08142008	0	32.25069722	-110.83816389	TANQUE VERDE RD	54
10	553	08292008	0	–	–	35TH AVE	28
11	566	09072008	2	32.16296111	-111.00652500	MISSION RD	50
12	573	09122008	0	32.26481389	-110.95234167	FORT LOWELL RD	15
13	585	09232008	0	33.50880556	-112.23706389	CAMELBACK RD	69
14	604	09272008	0	32.26353889	-110.96099722	1ST AVE	46
15	616	10042008	0	–	–	SR-87	40
16	652	10092008	0	–	–	US-89	38
17	666	09172008	2	33.49768056	-112.09130278	15TH AVE	56
18	673	09202008	0	–	–	CASA GRANDE HWY	60
19	699	10262008	2	33.66721667	-112.24961667	BEARDSLEY RD	65
20	825	12052008	0	–	–	32ND ST	42

One of these 20 (case number 18) was a seriously injured cyclist — thus the total for 2008 is 19 fatalites despite there being 20 rows of information.

Here is a really cool visualization map map.itoworld.com of all 2001-2009 fatals. (they also have UK)

The Technical Details

The gory details of how the data is coded is in Electronic 2009 FARS Coding and Validation Manual, HS 811 353; along with the 1975-2008 FARS Analytic Reference Guide HS 811 352. These are both huge documents loaded with nitty-gritty details and both seem to cover similar material.

I’ve never had much luck with the web query front end; and for big jobs I download the actual datasets which are zipped together as a bunch of .dbf files. These files can be read by many applications; I used a (very old, from Office 97) Microsoft Excel and it worked fine. Incidentally I could not open the large table with OpenOffice ver 3.2 — it apparently limits to 64K rows of data and the one set is too big.

Statistical Hole?

“”To be included in the file set, a crash had to involve a motor vehicle traveling on a traffic way customarily open to the public” — FARS Analytic Reference Guide.

Where, then, do bicyclist traffic fatalities that involve either parked motor vehicles (see e.g. this one on 12/20/2008 ), or no motor vehicle at all (reported 4/27/2010 loss of control, near Sedona) get recorded? Apparently, and its not completely consistent, the answer is FARS doesn’t usually record non-roadway / non motor-vehicle involved fatalities (one counter-example is in 2009, there was one cyclist killed in a driveway, and that was in FARS). Ohiobikelawyer.com details a couple of motorist fatalities in 2010 where bicyclists were involved; one incidentally, and the other was listed as the cause of the fatality (April 30, and July 11 respectively). It will be interesting to see how/if these get coded in FARS 2010 when it becomes available.
..

Jane C. Stutts and William W. Hunter 1999 study Injuries to Pedestrians and Bicyclists: An Analysis Based on Hospital Emergency Department Data, (the FHWA contact is Carol Tan Esse) says that:

More bicyclists are injured in bicycle-only events than in collisions with motor vehicles

And in their data, out of 1,066 incidents, only 280 (26%) were bicycle-MV road (so-called quadrant A), Table 7. And perhaps noteworthy is that bicycle-MV non-road was quite insignificant (23 incidents).But of course many many of those were not serious, in Table 14 they split it three ways; Treat&Release, Admitted, Fatal — i.e. from least to most serious. Most of those Admitted (68/120) and nearly all Fatals (5/6) were bicycle-MV road (as i would have expected), versus the other three possibilities. Here is the way they couched the fatals in their intro/literature seach:

The Rodgers (1993; 1995) and Baker et al. (1993) studies also made comparisons between bicycle-related deaths reported by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) based on death certificate data and the FARS data based on State police crash reports. Generally, these comparisons revealed that FARS contains 8-10 percent fewer bicycle-related deaths than does the NCHS database. This was attributed to the fact that approximately 10-14 percent of bicycle-related fatalities do not involve a motor vehicle and/or do not occur on public roadways. These findings are supported by earlier analyses carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, showing that 90 percent of bicyclist fatalities involve motor vehicles and 86 percent occur on public roadways (Sacks et al., 1991)

So I think the answer to the question: How many bicyclists are killed NOT as a result of MV collision? Is like 10% based on these studies they cited above (Rodgers and Baker, and Sacks).Or in terms of sweeping statements; I think it is fair to say something like:

Nearly all bicyclists are killed as a result of a MV collision.

Unreported and Underreported Crashes

While nearly all fatalities get reported, less severe of course tends to be significantly not reported in some fashion. There is also a separate category of excluded crashes for various reasons, i have a list of such non-traffic crashes.

Interesting material here from National Telephone Survey of
Reported and Unreported Motor Vehicle Crashes 812183.pdf

NHTSA publishes crash statistics based on police accident reports, but many crashes are never reported by the police. In 1981 NHTSA sponsored a telephone survey to estimate the incidence of unreported crashes. That survey estimated 47 percent of crashes go unreported. In 2008 NHTSA paid for an updated survey, reported here. The present survey, completed in 2010, collected data on 2,299 crashes, 697 of which were unreported to police. When the data were properly weighted, the participant responses indicated that approximately 30 percent of crashes go unreported. In both surveys the crashes were mostly property-damage-only crashes, although some unreported injury crashes were found. However, the data in this report is only one aspect of the unreported crash problem. See Chapter 5 of The Economic and Societal Impact of Motor Vehicle Crashes, 2010 (DOT HS 812 013), for a more thorough explanation of this problem.

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