About CrashRate
Fatal crashes per place, with the math shown
CrashRate started with a question people ask after a bad wreck makes the local news: how dangerous are the roads here, really? The answers online are a yearly "deadliest counties" story and injury-lawyer listicles, none of which show the count, the population or the miles behind the number.
So Eric built something better. CrashRate is a collection of free, no-account-required pages that give you the fatal crash rate for any US county or state, from the federal government's own crash record, and show you exactly how each figure was reached.
Eric builds small, single-purpose reference sites on public data. He is not a traffic engineer or a safety researcher, and CrashRate doesn't pretend to be either. NHTSA records every fatal crash in the country and publishes the file for anyone to use, but it ships as a database, not an answer. He built CrashRate to turn it into one that anyone can check.
Part of the Veraino network of free websites.
How it works
Every tool on CrashRate is grounded in a documented, citable method — a published formula, an authoritative standard, or a well-established model. We don't approximate or invent numbers. If we can't cite a primary source for the logic, we don't publish the tool.
For CrashRate specifically, every crash count comes from NHTSA's Fatality Analysis Reporting System, every population from the Census Bureau and every mileage figure from the Federal Highway Administration, and each page names the year and the file it used. Before a page ships, its figures are checked by hand against the agency's own published tables.
Our commitments
- Free, no sign-up required. Every tool on this site is free to use with no account, subscription, or paywall.
- We show our work. Every tool explains its methodology, cites its sources, and surfaces assumptions — so you can verify the logic, not just trust the output.
- Honest about limitations. Where precision is limited or assumptions are required, we say so. Tools compute; they don't replace professional judgment.
- Kept current. Tools that use figures that can change over time carry a “last reviewed” date and are treated as an ongoing maintenance responsibility, not a one-time build.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections, or suggestions: hello@crashrate.com. Eric reads every message personally.