Federal Open Data: Transportation Fatalities

Alright, I went to the Administration’s open data portal and secured FARS data for 2016: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/fatality-analysis-reporting-system-fars-ftp-raw-data

There’s a ton of stuff there. FARS stands for the Fatality Analysis Reporting System. It’s a census of roadway fatalities and includes a signifcant amount of identifying information including geographic coordinates.

## Loading required package: methods

OK, first calculate fatalities in any point in the metro area. First I need to reconcile geographic units because FARS uses a funky county code.

metro = read.csv("/Users/chriseshleman/Downloads/metrolist.csv", sep=",", header=F) 
metro = subset(metro,V1==35620) 
metro$cbsacode = as.numeric(as.character(metro$V1)) 
metro$V1 = NULL 
metro$fipscountycode = as.numeric(as.character(metro$V3)) 
cross = read.csv("/Users/chriseshleman/Downloads/cbsa2fipsxw.csv") 
cross = subset(cross,cross$cbsatitle=="New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA") 
cross$cbsacode = as.numeric(cross$cbsacode) 
cross$county = str_pad(cross$fipscountycode, 3, pad = "0") 
cross$fipscountycode = paste(cross$fipsstatecode,cross$county,sep="") 

metro = merge(metro,cross,by="fipscountycode") 

fars = merge(metro, acc, by="county",all.x=T)

p = ggplot(fars, aes(V4, fatals)) + geom_bar(stat = "identity", aes(fill="red"))
ggsave(p,file="/Users/chriseshleman/Dropbox/pages/chriseshleman.github.io/images/Fatalities.png", width=8,height=5)  

Fatalities by county.

Written on January 3, 2018