2022 Preliminary Arizona Traffic Crash Stats

[UPDATE: yes, this is wrong wrong wrong. 2022 was in fact a terrible, bad, worse year; see Arizona Crash Facts 2022 ]

This is a warning about preliminary data and drawing stats from it… there was a news article “Arizona traffic fatalities are down in 2022, data shows” that was suggesting that 2022 might be on-track for significantly fewer traffic fatalities:

After a deadlier than usual year for traffic deaths in 2021, fatalities in 2022 showed a sharp decrease, according to preliminary data from the Arizona Governor’s Office of Highway Safety.
According to the preliminary data from the office, traffic fatalities between January and June fell from 626 deaths in 2021 to 350 deaths in 2022 — a 44% decrease.

Sadly, this is unlikely to be true.

Traffic crash data gets reported up from any of the dozens of law enforcement agencies throughout Arizona to ADOT who is responsible for collating and maintaining all traffic records. In the database there is a field, ADOTReceivedDate; there is a time lag from when the incident occurs, to when it enters the database that can be anything between a day or two and as much as 11 months. Fatalities, in particular tend to lag, typically by at least weeks, and often even more when criminality (e.g. impairment) is suspected.

So, for example if you look at the first half of 2021, there were in total 617 fatalities (the news story said 626, not sure why there would be a small discrepancy?); but only 342 were reports as of 7/1/2021 (July 1st was the date mentioned in the article); which is coincidentally exactly the same “decrease”, 44%, noted in the article for 2022.

I would draw from that, that we in AZ are very unlikely to be seeing a decrease in traffic fatalities compared to 2021; much more likely we’re seeing a repeat of 2021’s high levels. 🙁

In any event, stay tuned for Arizona Crash Facts 2021 which will probably be released shortly; the most recent at the moment is still 2020 https://azbikelaw.org/arizona-crash-facts-2020/

SELECT SUM(TotalFatalities) FROM 2021_incident;
SELECT SUM(TotalMotoristsFatalities) FROM 2021_incident WHERE sF_Pedestrian;
SELECT SUM(TotalMotoristsFatalities) FROM 2021_incident WHERE sF_Bicycle;
SELECT SUM(TotalNonMotoristsFatalities) FROM 2021_incident WHERE sF_Pedestrian;
SELECT SUM(TotalNonMotoristsFatalities) FROM 2021_incident WHERE sF_Bicycle;


SELECT SUM(i.TotalFatalities) FROM 2021_incident AS i WHERE i.IncidentDateTime < '2021-07-01' ;
SELECT SUM(i.TotalFatalities) FROM 2021_incident AS i WHERE i.IncidentDateTime < '2021-07-01' AND i.ADOTReceivedDate < '2021-07-02' ;

SELECT SUM(i.TotalFatalities) FROM 2021_incident AS i WHERE i.IncidentDateTime < '2021-07-01' AND AlcoholInvolvementFlag ;
SELECT SUM(i.TotalFatalities) FROM 2021_incident AS i WHERE i.IncidentDateTime < '2021-07-01' AND i.ADOTReceivedDate < '2021-07-02' AND AlcoholInvolvementFlag ;