Car Accident Statistics, Fatalities, Women Drivers and a Few Drunks

Car accident statistics seemed like a good topic to post since my two teens are in the midst of getting their driver's licenses and their first (very used) cars. On top of that, my latest writing assignment was coincidentally on car insurance - just as I was panicking over how high my car insurance rates will rise once they're both on my policy. Fortunately, I have stayed alive to write this post even through their first bout of city driving.

Just to warn everyone - there's going to be a couple more women drivers on the road. Statistically speaking, despite slanderous jargon about women drivers (mostly from my father), people should be grateful that these two new drivers are women and not men. Even recent 2007 fatality statistics by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety shows that men are the drivers in the high majority of fatal accidents. The Institute's 2007 Fact Sheet has charts demonstrating fatal accident and gender statistics from 1975 to 2007.

Of course, the Center for Disease Control's Teen Driver Fact Sheet's mention of car accidents being the number one reason for teenage deaths in the US doesn't help me sleep well at night when my teens are out with their friends. But within these teenage statistics from the CDC is the data that teen female drivers between the ages of 16 and 19 are far less likely to die than their male friends. The CDC looks like they also have some interactive statistics and mapping toys that can be used to investigate car accident statistics.

Personally, if I were to compare my older boys with my two teen girls and their driving style, I have one in each gender that is very cautious and rule abiding, and I also have on in each gender that is over-confident about their driving abilities. Over-confidence can be a killer, but it is probably not as deadly as alcohol. (However, that's debatable. We haven't mastered measuring car accidents due to over-confidence yet.)

Men are responsible for the majority of alcohol realted deaths. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, in their gender report states the difference:

From 1982 to 2007, the proportion of fatally injured passenger vehicle drivers with blood alcohol concentrations (BACs) at or above 0.08 percent declined by 29 percent among males and 37 percent among females. Since 1985 the percentage of fatally injured male drivers with high BACs has been about twice that of female drivers.

Under the quote in that report is data from the 1980s to 2007 that lists statistics on alcohol related car accidents and BAC levels. The good news is that alcohol related fatal deaths are decreasing. And so are car accidents. CNN has a news article summarizing some alcohol related car accident statistics.

In the US, car accidents reached their all-time low since the rumbling days of hot rods and drag racing in the 1960s and the peak of the 1970s according to 2008 statistics (reported in June 2009) from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in their 2008 statistics summary of traffic safety facts. If you need to go global, you'll find some links on the US Department of State Travel page that has links to transportation and traffic statistics. (More global websites for international car accident statistics are listed later on in this blog post.)

Here is a link to the cache version of the NHTSA report that appears in Google Doc form:

Google Doc version of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration(NHTSA)2008 Traffic Safety Facts.

Here is a link to the pdf version of the NHTSA report:

PDF version of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration(NHTSA)2008 Traffic Safety Facts.

Overall, the number of people injured in car accidents in the US dropped from the 2.49 million in 2007 to "only" 2.35 million in 2008. The 2008 NHTSA car accident statistic report has a lot of valuable statistics and data and is likely one of the more recent sources for car accident statistics. You can also take a look at the Bureau of Transportation Statistics website for traffic data to support car accident data research. You'll also find some car accident statistics hiding in railroad, airline and boat accident statistics. (I have more research links on plane crashes and holiday travel statistics under the "transportation" labeled blog posts if you need more information in those areas.)

Another popular source for car accident statistics is the FARS - Fatality Analysis Report System. They have comparative statistics of car accidents and motorcycle accidents in a nicely laid out table that runs from 1994 to 2007. Ratios, mileage and population comparisons are listed as well as car accident statistics involving pedestrians and bicylists. FARS also has links to 2007 car accident statistics by state, (no surprise that California has the most and Rhode Island has the least) which list fatal accident statistics, as well as car accident statistics that involve a collision with an object. Their car accident reports by state also includes a page of alcohol related car accident statistics and BAC level statistics by state.

The FARR website also has links to trends and other reports, data and statistics on vehicle accidents. They even have a link to an excellent query page that offers tabulation reports on all sorts of data like vehicle types, times, license status, driver height, and all kinds of goodies. Great stuff if you need to get down and dirty and put your stats into a spreadsheet or need some good data to prove or refute a point. Ooooo time to play...wow that's great - after doing a query you get to go to see the full information of each report filed if you want. Code 11 in sequence of events is hitting an animal. I was just looking at deer statistics, however I know that there are always people hitting deer around here and getting their cars dented, but accident reports are hardly ever made.

Since I have no need for the data now I better stop playing. Let's move on to global and international car accident statistics. What better place to start than the World Health Organization. WHO knows everything about what's going on in the world, because in one way or another, everything will probably affect a person's health. They even have a page on world car accident information. A 2004 page describes motor vehicle accidents as a "hidden epidemic" with statistics backing up the claim. WHO has a lot of pdf reports on road injuries and road safety around the world.

There is a "Causes of Death" Excel file on the World Health Organizations Data and Statistics page that gives you a great spreadsheet of deaths by countries, and it includes data on deaths due to "road traffic accidents" by country. On the Pan American page of unintentional accidents on the WHO website you can find a link to a world traffic injury and prevention report that contains road traffic and vehicle accident research and statistics. You can also take a look at a WHO European page that shows some car accident statistics that closely mirrors the US and a list of links to European road traffic safety, injury and transport reports. You can also find some nice graphs and charts in the 2007 European Road Safety Day car accident and traffic safety report.

The BAST (Federal Highway Research Institute in Germany) has pdfs and links to car accident statistics in Germany.

A google book result brings up the WHO's World Report on Road Traffic which contains a lot of statistics and information, although I'm not sure how the information on the website differs from the information in the book, but it might be quicker just to look at the google book result to get a quick overview of international car accident statistics.

Wikipedia has links to resources for car accident statistics on their entry for Traffic Collision and Road Traffic Safety. From there you'll also see a Wikipedia link to information on the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, Road Casulaties Great Britain, a list of car accidents (motor vehicle accidents) in Japan and car accidents in Thailand.

UK car accident statistics can be found on the Department of Transport (DfT) website page containing transportation and traffic statistics and statistics on UK accidents. They also have a report on forecasting older driver accidents.

If those aren't enough, you can find more UK car accident statistics at the UK's Office of National Statistics (ONS) website and their page on UK road traffic accident statistics. The British Medical Journal has a free text study which includes statistics comparing car accident police reports and hospital records. (I love the BMJ and use it a lot. I wish all journals would provide free full text!)

If you want to go a wee bit south in the Commonwealth and need some car accident statistics on New South Wales, Australia, head over to their Road and Traffic Authority website and look at their page on crash statistics for free download information on Australia car accident statistics.

Staying south, the South African Department of Transportation website has a link to car accident statistics and road safety information in South Africa covering 2001 to 2005,with some statistics from the 1990s thrown in. There's also graphs in the report comparing South Africa statistics to Australia, China and other countries. Other statistics on South Africa car accidents can be found at the "about us" page Road Safety in South Africa and the "Arrive Alive" website that published the "about us" post, including some 2009 accident stats from Africa's N4 Toll Route.

Science Daily, (one of my favorite websites), has a short article stating some car accident statistics in Africa while claiming that Africa has the highest death rate from car accidents compared to other countries. If you're interested in data collection methods used in collecting Africa car accident statistics, someone was kind enough to upload a report on the implementation and process of using a MAPP data collection method in Africa. (If you're interested in more links on statistics and data involving Africa in general, take a look at my blog posts tagged Africa.)

If you want to delve into some car accident statistics and road traffic statistics, check out the uploaded documents at thesearch results at Scribd for "road traffic accidents," and the graphs and charts posted on "car accidents" at Swivel, or even the "road traffic safety" search results from my blog (that now needs some serious updating).

Looking at these stats, I'm very grateful that my life has never been touched directly by a fatal car accident, although my teenagers always seem to know somebody who knows somebody who was in a near-fatal accident. I have known a few women from church who lost their teens in car accidents - an unbearable thought to me. My boyfriend, however, was touched directly by fatal accidents, and lost his brother and his son to two different motorcycle accidents (years apart) - one caused by a drunk driver in a car, and one caused by teenage over-confidence. No statistic in the world can represent that loss and pain of losing a family member, and especially a child.

It's good to see that car accidents are being lowered, and drunk driving is on a downhill slide. I hope the road safety advocates keep up the good work and are continuously successful at saving lives and keeping our young ones alive.

Holiday Statistics and Links to More Holiday Statistics

The holiday season is almost over. I hope everyone had some joyous heartwarming moments during the last few busy weeks. My heart was overjoyed when my beautiful twenty-two year old daughter surprised me by coming up for Christmas after previously telling me she couldn't make it. (Everyone knew about it but me and my eight year old!) I hadn't seen her for a year, which was the longest we've ever gone from seeing each other. It was a comforting and teary-eyed reunion. I don't know what I'm going to do when all of the kids are off and on their own! Right now it's 3 down, 3 to go – and the first of the last three is a senior, so she'll be off experiencing life on her own later this year.

Statistics on holidays indicate there are likely heartwarming (or teeth-gritting) family reunions taking place around the nation during the November and December holiday season. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics reports (with little surprise) that November and December are the most popular months for long distance travel. I did find it a little surprising though that the Bureau's holiday statistics reported that 91% of the holiday travel was done by a “personal vehicle” (typically a car, although I suppose somebody somewhere is flying their own personal jet home for the holidays). The BTS's holiday statistics also stated that people will drive a little farther at Christmas. The average trip for Thanksgiving is around 214 miles, whereas the average trip for Christmas is around 275 miles. My daughter drove from Virginia to New York, so her trip was a wee bit farther than the average.

We had a turkey dinner on Christmas Eve. I should say we had a Thanksgiving dinner on Christmas Eve. We ate one of the 271 million turkeys that are raised in the US, according to the US Census Bureau. It's pretty much picked apart by now, despite my vegetarian seventeen year old daughter passing on her turkey portions. I'm not even sure if I have enough to make turkey soup. At least I'll get some broth out of it.

We also had a couple cans of the 649 million pounds of cranberries that are produced in the nation according to the Census Bureau's Thanksgiving Day Special Feature Report. (Some people watch special features on TV, us statistic junkies read special features from government statistical agencies or Swivel holiday statistics.) I couldn't find any fresh cranberries when I went shopping, so had to settle for canned. And there's one more statistic on cranberries that I bet you didn't know. There were 8 census designated areas (town, city, etc.) with the name Cranberry, or a spelling of the same sound (Cranbury) in 2003 – and only one with the name Pilgrim. What's confusing is the Census Bureau's 2008 reported listed there were only five places with the name Cranberry. What happened to the other three? I bet nobody discussed that at their Christmas Eve dinner. (Except maybe the person that chose to look up that statistics for the holiday report.) If I were living in Cranberry I might be worried about the fact that almost half the towns with my namesake disappearing.

If you just can't wait to hear more on holiday statistics, pay a visit to the Census Bureau website. The Census Bureau has special reports and links to facts and statistics on holidays at their Facts & Features Special Editions Page. If you're into retail or e-commerce, the feature's page includes holiday statistics on retail sales, shopping, e-commerce and other frequently sought statistics. It's convenient to start your holiday statistics research on the Facts and Features page because each item has a direct link to their source, which can provide you with more detailed information.

If you're interested in international holiday statistics, check out the World Tourism Organization website and do a search for “holidays” in their website's search engine. You can also do a search for holidays (or any other search term for statistics) at the search engine on this blog, and it will only search websites that have have statistics.

The Intute website has a tremendous collection of links to statistics on holidays. They have a fantastic search engine that searches reputable journals, websites with statistics, and thousands of resources from major universities. They have links to hundreds of national and international tourism statistics and holiday statistics, including some international holiday statistics on consumer spending and economics from the Euromonitor International Website and Ecoholidaying and the effects of tourism.

The UK's Office of National Statistics also has data and statistics on holidays in the UK as well as international holiday travel statistics. If you're into UK holiday data, check out Seaside History for historical data on UK holiday vacations at the seaside from the 1950s to the early 21st century. You'll find historical data on waterfront vacations, holiday accommodations and holiday travel and transportation in the UK. The Virtual Library of Useful URL's has links in their social sceince category that have statistics on holidays, as well as histories and general knowledge of national and international holidays. There are quite a few links, so just do a Ctrl F (or Edit Find) on the page for "holiday" to see all of the listings on holidays and statistics on holidays.

Along with all these heartwarming holiday reunions are billions of holiday greeting cards traveling from crowded greeting card display units to the hands of friends and families around the world. Hallmark's corporate website has holiday statistics on (what else?) greeting cards which include the statistic that 2.1 billion Christmas Cards are purchased for Christmas. But are they actually mailed out? I couldn't even begin to tell you how many years I bought Christmas cards and never got around to mailing them. And what about e-cards?

The United States Postal Service has a webpage on USPS statistics, facts and trivia. The Census Bureau reports that the USPS reports that about 20 billion pieces of mail go out between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and about one million packages get mailed during the holiday season. Wonder how many letters are addressed to the North Pole? This brings to mind Miracle on 34th Street, my 8 year old's favorite Christmas movie (B&W), and the scene where they dumped all the letters to Santa on the judge's desk. I love that movie. If you really want to know what's going on at the post office, you can take a look at the 2008 Comprehensive Statement of Postal Services. If you really want to. Which, you probably don't. (Link is to cached version, PDF version is available.)

If you want to plan a day to watch movies instead of reviewing post office holiday operations, you can get an idea of when Federal Holidays are scheduled by visiting the US Office of Personnel Management. They have a list of Federal Holidays for 2009 and other upcoming years. If you live in Washington D.C. you'll have off for inauguration day! (Wouldn't they require more staff?) DMOZ has lots of links to Calendars and Holidays, Wikipedia has a list of holidays by country, and the International Bank Holidays website has holidays lists up to the year 2050, and even in a visual map form. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has started putting out a yearly National Compensation Survey, which includes holiday benefit statistics and data from private and public employers.

There is a substantial amount of data in tables that can give you statistics on wages and holiday pay, retirement benefits, sick pay, health benefits, and more by industry, sector, size, and other standard BLS and Census categories. If you want to see if your holiday pay is par for your industry - the Compensation Survey is the place to check. They also have a search engine that searches only compensation data. At the top of my BTS compensation search for holidays was the result that clearly states "Contrary to popular beliefs, employers are not obligated under Federal laws to grant paid holiday benefits to their employees." Bummers. Thankfully, the majority of employers in the US do provide holiday pay - although I do have to say our benefits have a long way to go to catch up with the rest of the civilized world.

So much for a short post on holiday statistics. I hope all my readers can soak up some holiday rest before they head out into the New Year. With a lively new president, we'll be bringing in an exciting new year. Merry Chirstmas and Happy Holidays to all - and to all a good night. (Now I can go find out what happened to the Cranberries!)

Browsing Browser Statistics

Reporting Statistics does hereby give thanks to Ourblogtemplates.com for providing me with a blog template that works in Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer.

I'm an avid Opera browser fan, but according to www.w3school.com and their 2008 Browser Statistics, I'm in the minority. Internet Explorer is still the most widely used browser, but Firefox is quickly meeting them halfway. W3school reports that as of July 2008, Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 are running neck and neck, and 26.4% and 25.3% respectively. Some late adopters, only .3%, are still hanging on to IE5. Firefox has gained almost half the market - quickly gathering up 42.6% of internet users. Poor Opera, only 1.9% have realized how wonderful the Opera browser is. Opera is a lot faster than IE and Firefox and is highly customizable. Disclosure: I have nothing to gain by promoting any browser. I just really like Opera. Hey, out of 215 million internet users in the US alone reported by Plunkett Research, 1.9% isn't too bad.

A great website that I visit frequently for Internet stats is Internet World Stats. If you need Internet Statistics, you'll find demographics like local, global, regional Internet and population information and all kinds of graphs to go along with it. Internet Stats is in my permanent bookmarks. I think they may sell some data, but there are pages and pages of free data for you to use to give your reports or research some more awe-inspiring data. (THAT many people are on the Internet?!!? I didn't even know that many people were alive!)

I'm adding to this post on August 26, 2008 after reading some more browser statistics on Tech Republic. The browser share they quote from The Counter is significantly different than W3Schools. (The Counter charges $19.95 and W3Schools is free.) They list IE at 77% and Firefox at 17%. I don't know about you - but that sounds far too low for fast-growing Firefox. For this blog, Firefox is the browser of choice and holds the majority at 41% and IE at 28%. W3School is given high regard in developer circles - and if you need to quote some browser statistics - quote the statistics from W3School. The Tech Republic article has some interesting comments and it's a worthwhile read for developers.

Adding to the post September 18, 2008: Just found this link with a graph on browsers in Russia from the Russian Opera blogger Andrey Petrov. Here are some more Opera browser statistics from his blog. He has a new baby in the home..so the posts are a little outdated - but I thought they might be of interest to someone researching browser statistics.

Update November 2009: Google Chrome Captures 3.6% of market.

2009 trends in browser statistics according to W3schools. Woo hoo! Opera is up to 2.3%!

For interest, there's a January 2009 article which lists reasons why statistics from the past may be skewed (i.e, election time).

Then there's Opera mini which has a far larger global share in the mobile browser wars.

Statistics on browsers in Russia.

The Opera 10 announcement at Canada.com states:

Microsoft's Internet Explorer is used for about 60 percent of global Internet traffic, and Mozilla's Firefox has about 30 percent, with usage of Opera, Google and Apple all around 3 percent each, according to Web analytics firm StatCounter.

Opera has a small share of the global desktop browser market, but its browser is the most popular in countries like Russia or Ukraine, and its mobile browser is the most widely used browser on handsets.

Opera also has their "State of the Mobile Web" report with current global statistics on mobile browser usage, particularly Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

Nonetheless, a simple chart showing the growth of Opera mini clearly demonstrates it's growth, and Stat Counter has 2009 statistics demonstrating that Opera Mini is overtaking the Iphone for mobile browsing. A September 2009 article from FinChannel (global financial news), also reports Opera Mini as the most popular mobile browser. Their quote:

Now, more than 31.9 million people use Opera Mini to browse the Web from their mobile phones. In August, Opera Mini gained at least one new user every second.

An article from Tech Arena has the same quote, but it goes further to list Opera statistics from Europe and around the globe. Here's their take on the top countries using Opera Mini:

The top 10 countries for Opera Mini usage are (in order): Russia, Indonesia, India, China, Ukraine, South Africa, United States, Nigeria, United Kingdom and Poland. There is no change to the top 10 countries this month.

But, those top 10 have changed. WatBlog reports the current top ten as of September as:

Russia, Indonesia, India, China, Ukraine, South Africa, United States, United Kingdom, Poland and Vietnam

They also list the top sites visited in India, comparing Google, Yahoo and others, and has other stats on Opera mobile browsing from September 2009.

Since I have other posts related to Africa and I'm finding interest in statistics from Africa from my readers, here's a website dedicated to PC and phone mobility in Nigeria, with statistics on Opera Mini in Nigeria.

There is a very resourceful wiki at W3org that lists mobile browsing statistics in developing countires, and has links to statistics on mobile browsing in Africa, including a Africa 2008 Mobile Fact Book in pdf format, and a pdf file with 2009 stats on mobile phone usage in Africa. More statistics on Africa browsing and mobility, including the expensive costs and transmission data, can be found at Martin Sauter's blog post on Africa and the Mobile Internet.

Boy did this update take on an angle I didn't expect. I'll have to get these recent links into my search engine.

Have fun keeping up with the browser wars - and don't let the statistics on mobile browser wars go unnoticed.