The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA, often pronounced "nit-suh") recently made public a new database to allow consumers to look up the number of alleged deaths, injuries and cases of property damage involving passenger vehicles.
Long sought by consumer groups, the database is part of legislation passed by Congress following the massive recall of Firestone tires in 2000 that required manufacturers to provide data on complaints of deaths, injuries, property damage and warranty claims. Specifically, the law was devised to help the government quickly detect potential trends in car accidents.
A ruling by a federal appeals court in July that barred the government from withholding key data reported by manufacturers forced NHTSA to open the database to the public earlier than expected. The hasty attempt to meet the court order deadline resulted in a scaled down approach that addresses only three data fields: specific manufacturer, report type, and reporting period. While the so-called "early warning report" data requires significant consumers to aggregate the data for each manufacturer, it is a step in the right direction towards removing the wall around government statistics.
Transparency and open-source experts would agree that important advancements occur when information is made available to the public - the number of applications used on Facebook and the iPhone exemplify the type of progress that is made when source data is made publicly available. If all government data were as assessable, scientists, statisticians, and web gurus could be slicing and dicing it to make it more palatable and relevant to consumers.
If death stats aren't your thing, but you are a nervous parent looking to put your son or daughter into a vehicle as close to a tank as possible, you can also locate excellent safety ratings on the NHTSA website. These ratings are available for rollover prevention, tires, airbags, and all vehicles.
The early warning reports and ratings can be found at: http://www.safercar.gov.
NHTTSA was established in 1970 by the Highway Safety Act of 1970 as part of the Department of Transportation (DOT). It describes its mission as "Save lives, prevent injuries, reduce vehicle-related crashes." The data release is a step in the right the direction towards that mission, and we look forward to further refinements in its delivery and expanded content.
Related Stories:
[+] DOT Creates New Lane For Reckless Drivers
[+] Department of Transportation
[+] Teen crashes cost $34 billion per year
[+] Today's Spotlight: A Contractor Misconduct Database
[+] House Oversight Committee Approves Contractor Performance Database
[+] Bureau Pat's Weekly Web Pick: The Social Security Administration's baby name database
[+] Today's Spotlight: USAspending.gov