:Cyclostat

 So, I was screwing around a few weeks ago and I came across some data that people might be interested in. I’m not sure how far this blog will go, but I decided to post some findings.

Basically, I found a government website, cited below, that catalogs motor vehicle accidents.  I had trouble visualizing the data just from the spreadsheets that they had posted, so I graphed my own along with a repeated measures ANOVA to see if any trends were statistically significant.

This first graph shows the number of motor vehicle related deaths from 1994 to 2007.

Turns out that, when taking into account the number of miles driven, the number of motor vehicle fatalities has been declining for years. This trend is statistically significant, at F(6.623, 337.79)=41.5, p<.001 (if anyone is interested).

But what does that mean for the gross number of fatalities? Are we driving more? Or are we driving safer?

I found the raw statistics for the number of motor vehicle fatalities from 1994 to 2007. Turns out, people are just driving more -with the number of raw deaths diluted by a larger increase in miles driven in the graph above.

The straight number of deaths actually hasn’t changed significantly over the last 14 years, but there were a lot of non-significant trends. It doesn’t really look like that trend is toward a decrease, either. F(1.71, 87.216)=2.742, p=0.078.

The last data point (2007) on the graph is a bit of an outlier, and I’m still trying to figure out if this is because of oil prices, or an increase in alternative transportation, or what. Whatever the case is, the drop from 2005/2006 to 2007 is pretty incredible, and I’m hoping that 2005/2006 is a peak we never have to return to.

It’s actually pretty cool, because it looks 2007  returned us to 1994 levels, and apparently we’re driving more. I’d be curious to see if that drop in 2007 is due to more bikers. I’ll report back later.

All data were taken from http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/States/StatesFatalitiesFatalityRates.aspx

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