fars_cleaner: A Python package for downloading and pre-processing vehicle fatality data in the US

Abstract

Historical vehicle safety analysis in the United States leans heavily on public datasets to determine factors leading to crash fatality. The Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) is one such database collected by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) documenting all vehicle fatalities in the United States since 1975. The FARS dataset is used to inform safety decisions at the local, state and national levels, and provides key insights into the efficacy of changing vehicle and trafficway safety standards (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2022). The FARS dataset is frequently used by vehicle safety researchers to track long-term trends in fatality outcomes. As the FARS data have evolved over time, the variable coding has changed, sometimes dramatically, in some cases making it difficult to compare and analyze data across decades.

Female vs. male relative fatality risk in fatal motor vehicle crashes in the US, 1975–2020

“…Data were downloaded from the US Department of Transportation–National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Fatality Analysis Reporting System (NHTSA FARS) FTP directory. Data pre-processing was performed using the fars-cleaner package, produced by the authors for this study and freely available as open source software [ 21 , 22 ]. Pre-processing with this package merged changes in the FARS dataset, adjusting outdated and modified codes using the FARS Analytical User Manual as reference [ 4 ].…”