The US Coast Guard maintains the Boating Accident Report Database (BARD) for recreational vessels and the Marine Casualty and Pollution Database (MCPD) for commercial casualties. Here is what each database contains, how alcohol and life-jacket non-use drive fatality statistics, and how journalists use the data to track manufacturer defects and rental company safety records.
Writing · topic · 33 articles
Transportation safety
Road, rail, air, maritime, and pipeline safety data, plus national transport infrastructure inventories.
The FMCSA maintains SAFER and MCMIS covering every commercial motor carrier in interstate commerce — three official safety ratings (Satisfactory, Conditional, Unsatisfactory), seven SMS BASICs scoring each carrier as a percentile, inspection counts, OOS rates, and crash data. Here is the data structure, how to access it, and what it reveals about high-risk carriers.
The Federal Railroad Administration publishes two linked databases covering US railroad safety since 1975: Form 54 (all rail accidents — derailments, collisions, fires, explosions) and Form 57 (highway-rail grade crossing accidents). Together they cover 250,000+ incidents with train information, track type, speed at accident, casualties, and equipment damage.
There is no single US recall database — cars are recalled by NHTSA, consumer products by the CPSC, food/drugs/devices by the FDA, and meat and poultry by USDA-FSIS. A guide to weaving the four feeds into one cross-agency recall view, joined on firm name and date, with the hazard-classification mismatches and what a unified view reveals.
Consumer protection · Health and medicine · Transportation safety · Engineering and infrastructure
A single agency owns the entire defect-to-outcome loop — NHTSA collects the complaints, opens the investigations, compels the recalls, tracks the completion reports, and counts the deaths. This guide assembles all five datasets into one pipeline and shows how to join a complaint cluster to the recall it provoked and the fatalities it cost.
Transportation safety · Consumer protection · Engineering and infrastructure
The US aviation-safety feedback loop is split across two agencies — the NTSB that investigates and the FAA that regulates — so the accident finding and the mandatory fix live in different databases. This guide traces an unsafe condition from accident, to airworthiness directive, to the registered fleet it applies to, joining four federal datasets on aircraft make and model into one accountable chain.
Airworthiness Directives are not advice — they are legally binding FAA orders, issued under 14 CFR Part 39, that ground an aircraft until an unsafe condition is fixed. This guide walks through the ~22,900 FAA rulemaking actions in the faa_actions table: how an AD turns an accident finding into a fleet-wide mandate, emergency ADs and the 737 MAX, aging-aircraft and engine directives, the join to the aircraft registry by make and model, and a worked Federal Register API walkthrough.
A recall only prevents harm if the defective part is actually replaced — and federal regulations make manufacturers report, quarter by quarter, how many recalled units they have repaired. This guide covers the ~73,600 quarterly completion reports behind the question the recall headline never answers: did the cars get fixed?
Before a recall there is an investigation. NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation works the space between a complaint pattern and a recall — opening a Preliminary Evaluation, escalating to an Engineering Analysis, and either forcing a recall or closing without action. This is the ~5,300-record federal account of how a safety defect moves from early signal to mass recall, the data behind Takata, the GM ignition switch, and Firestone.
Every reportable US railroad accident since 1975 — derailments, collisions, grade-crossing strikes — flows to the Federal Railroad Administration on Form 6180.54 and lands in the Railroad Accident/Incident Reporting System. This guide covers the reporting threshold, the cause-code taxonomy, the East Palestine and PTC debates, and how ~224,000 records join to the grade-crossing inventory.
The Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) contains a record for every motor vehicle crash death on US public roads since 1975 — 1.1M+ fatalities with vehicle type, crash circumstances, driver behavior, and roadway conditions. Here is the data structure, how to download it, and what it reveals about drunk driving trends, pedestrian deaths, and the safety gap between vehicle classes.
The FAA Airmen Certification Database is the federal registry of every person certified to work in American aviation — roughly 881,000 pilots, flight instructors, mechanics, dispatchers, and parachute riggers, each with a unique FAA identifier, certificate type and level, ratings, and medical class, published as the public Releasable Airmen file.
Every civil aircraft flying legally in the United States carries an N-number on its tail, and behind each tail number sits a row in the FAA Aircraft Registry — roughly 293,000 registered aircraft with serial number, manufacturer, model, year, registrant, airworthiness class, and the Mode S hex code that bridges the registry to live ADS-B flight tracking.
The Federal Railroad Administration maintains a record of every place a road and a railroad meet in the United States — 250,636 crossings, each with a unique DOT crossing number, warning-device type, and train and traffic counts, paired with a companion database of every train-vehicle collision, forming the foundation of US grade-crossing safety analysis.
The FMCSA crash file records every state-reported crash involving a federally regulated commercial truck or bus — 258,057 crashes keyed to the carrier USDOT number, covering fatalities, injuries, tow-aways, and hazmat releases, feeding the CSA Crash Indicator safety score and a decade of policy debate over large-truck safety.
The FMCSA motor carrier census records every entity holding a USDOT number — 2.18 million interstate trucking companies, bus and motorcoach operators, hazmat carriers, freight forwarders, and brokers — the federal registry that underpins safety oversight, insurance underwriting, and freight broker vetting across US trucking.
The NHTSA vehicle safety complaints database contains every consumer complaint filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — 3 million+ complaints covering unexpected acceleration, brake failures, airbag malfunctions, fire risks, and steering defects — forming the primary data source for NHTSA defect investigations that trigger the largest vehicle recalls in US history.
The National Transportation Safety Board has maintained a structured record of every civil aviation accident in the United States since 1962 — 90,000+ accidents and incidents coded against a standardized schema covering aircraft type, phase of flight, weather conditions, pilot experience, injury counts, and probable cause findings that drive the largest safety reforms in US aviation history.
The Federal Highway Administration Highway Performance Monitoring System is the national database for US roadway conditions — collecting pavement condition ratings, traffic volumes, lane miles, and functional class data for 4.1 million miles of public roads, from Interstate highways to rural local roads, enabling Congress to calculate federal highway funding formulas and researchers to track infrastructure decline.
Transportation safety · Engineering and infrastructure · Federal data
The FAA Civil Aviation Registry maintains two of the most comprehensive public databases in US aviation — the Airmen Certification Database covering 700,000 active pilots with certificate type, ratings, and medical status, and the Aircraft Registration Database covering 300,000 registered civil aircraft with owner, make, model, and airworthiness information.
The Department of Energy Alternative Fuels Station Locator database tracks every publicly accessible electric vehicle charging station, hydrogen station, propane station, CNG station, and other alternative fuel outlet in the United States — 180,000+ stations as of 2024, with real-time status for DCFC fast chargers, providing the most comprehensive federal dataset on EV charging infrastructure deployment.
Environment and energy · Transportation safety · Federal data
The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration maintains incident reports for every significant gas and liquid pipeline accident in the United States — spills, explosions, injuries, fatalities, and property damage — creating the most comprehensive public record of pipeline safety performance across 2.7 million miles of US pipeline infrastructure.
Transportation safety · Engineering and infrastructure · Federal data
The Federal Highway Administration National Bridge Inventory collects biennial condition ratings for every highway bridge in the United States — 620,000 bridges covering structural sufficiency, deck ratings, superstructure, substructure, and channel conditions.
Transportation safety · Engineering and infrastructure · Federal data
The Fatality Analysis Reporting System is a census of every motor vehicle crash in the United States resulting in death — 50 years of data, 2 million fatalities, and the primary evidence base for federal highway safety policy.
FRA (Federal Railroad Administration) accident reporting system (49 CFR Part 225): ~224k records since 1975. Train accidents (Form 54), grade crossing (Form 57), employee injuries (Form 55). Cause codes: Track/Equipment/Human Factors/Misc. Reportable threshold: $11,200+ damage, or death/injury/evacuation/hazmat. East Palestine OH Feb 2023: Norfolk Southern 32N derailment; vinyl chloride; controlled burn; NTSB 37 recommendations. Grade crossing: ~2,000-2,200 collisions/yr, ~270-290 deaths, 128,000 public crossings. PTC: mandated 2008 Rail Safety Improvement Act after Chatsworth 2008 (25 dead); fully implemented 2020. FRA: 140,000 inspections/yr, 28,000 violations, $27,904 max penalty. CRISI grants $1B+ (IIJA 2021). FRA Safety Data API at safetydata.fra.dot.gov; bulk CSV Forms 54/57/55. Python derailments by state + hazmat releases by commodity.
FMCSA's MCMIS tracks ~500,000 reportable CMV crashes per year. Large truck fatalities reached 5,837 in 2022 -- the highest since 2005. 80%+ of truck crash fatalities are passenger vehicle occupants. The Large Truck Crash Causation Study (963 crashes) found driver error in 55% of crashes (87% decision/recognition/performance errors). HOS regulations: 11-hour drive limit, 14-hour window, ELD mandate December 2017. CSA SMS: 7 BASICs updated monthly. Roadside inspections: 3.5M/year, 20% vehicle OOS rate, 5% driver OOS rate. ATA v. FMCSA 2019 removed BASIC percentile scores from public display. SAFER, A&I portal, FMCSA public API, NHTSA FARS complement. Industry: 3.5M drivers, 750,000 carriers, 350,000 owner-operators. Here is the state fatality rate normalized by FHWA VMT, time-of-day and road-type breakdowns, critical reason attribution, and a Python carrier-level crash lookup.
The NTD collects annual ridership (UPT), vehicle miles, fares, and expenses from ~800 transit agencies as a condition of FTA grants. US total UPT hit 10.4B in 2023, still below the 15.7B pre-COVID peak. The COVID collapse was severe — NYC subway fell from 1.8B to 600M annual trips — and $69B in emergency relief (CARES + CRRSAA + ARP) kept systems running. Section 5307 formula grants (~$5B/year) are allocated directly from NTD UPT/VRM data.
The BTS ATOP/ASQP database covers ~6 million flight records per year from all domestic carriers with 1%+ market share, with delay coded across five cause categories: Carrier (~30-35%), NAS (~30-35%), Late Aircraft (~35-45%), Weather (~5-10%), and Security (<1%). Here is the T-100 domestic/international traffic series (ASM, RPM, load factor), Form 41 carrier financials (CASM, RASM, fuel as 20-30% of costs), the COVID collapse (96% RPM decline April 2020, $54B CARES Act PSP), the Southwest December 2022 meltdown (17,000 cancelled flights, $140M DOT settlement), the 3-hour/4-hour tarmac delay rule, BTS Transtats bulk download, and a Python script to compute monthly on-time rate and cancellation rate by carrier.
The Federal Highway Administration publishes the most comprehensive infrastructure dataset in the federal government: the National Bridge Inventory (620,000+ bridges, biennial inspection, 0–9 condition ratings, sufficiency score), the Highway Performance Monitoring System (pavement IRI, Good/Fair/Poor condition, 900,000+ road segments), Annual Average Daily Traffic counts, and Highway Statistics (registered vehicles, licensed drivers, gas tax revenues). Here is the structurally deficient vs. functionally obsolete distinction, the IIJA 2021 $40B bridge repair program, the Highway Trust Fund solvency crisis (gas tax frozen at $0.184/gallon since 1993, EVs avoiding it), the Freight Analysis Framework commodity-flow OD matrices, and a Python NBI bridge data script to map structurally deficient bridges by sufficiency rating.
Transportation safety · Engineering and infrastructure · Federal data
The federal aviation safety ecosystem spans four major databases: the NTSB accident database (every civil aviation accident since 1962), the FAA AIDS system, the NASA-administered Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS — voluntary, confidential, non-punitive near-miss reports), and the FAA Wildlife Strike Database. Here is the NTSB probable cause taxonomy (pilot error 70%+ of GA accidents), the Boeing 737 MAX MCAS investigation, the ASRS reporting immunity mechanism, runway incursion categories, the Miracle on Hudson Canada Goose strike context, the FAA Civil Aviation Registry N-number database, pilot workforce demographics, and a Python NTSB bulk CSV phase-of-flight fatal accident rate analysis.
The NHTSA Fatality Analysis Reporting System is a complete census of every US traffic fatality since 1975 — not a sample, but a record of all 38,000–43,000 annual deaths with linked accident, vehicle, and person detail. Here is the three-table structure (accident/vehicle/person), key variable codes (HARM_EV, MAN_COLL, LGT_COND, DRUNK_DR), the COVID anomaly (miles driven −13% but fatality rate spiked 24%), the alcohol-impaired decline from 20K/year in the 1980s to 10.5K/year, the pedestrian fatality rise from 4,300 to 7,500 since 2010, the CRSS companion for non-fatal crashes, and a Python state-level pedestrian fatality rate analysis.
The Bureau of Transportation Statistics publishes monthly counts of every border crossing type at ~290 US land ports going back to 1996 — personal vehicles, pedestrians, trucks, buses, trains, and containers broken out by crossing type and port. Here is the full taxonomy, the COVID-19 collapse (pedestrians -93%, trucks -28%), the San Ysidro and Laredo dominance, and how to use the Socrata API for supply chain and trade flow analysis.
NHTSA maintains the recall database covering every safety-related defect since 1966 — 900M+ vehicles affected, with the Takata airbag inflator recall (70M vehicles, 28+ deaths from metal shrapnel) as the largest in US history. Here is the data structure, the NHTSA complaint-to-recall investigation pipeline, and how to query by VIN.
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