Highway to Hell

Highway to Hell

— people were killed in — crashes on American roads from —. This map plots every one of them.

Reading the map

• Zoom in and every crash appears as its own dot, sized by lives lost. Nothing is grouped, averaged, or smoothed — each dot is one crash. Tap one for the full record: date and time, conditions, every vehicle, every person.
• Dots cover whatever is on screen, across state lines — the map only pulls the small square of the country you are actually looking at, so it stays fast on a phone. Zoomed out past that, the counter still totals the area in view.
• The bars are deaths per year. Drag the two handles to narrow the map to a span of years.

The data

Crash records come from NHTSA's Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) — the federal census of every motor-vehicle crash on a public road that kills someone within 30 days. Tapping a dot loads that crash's full FARS record: conditions, vehicles, and the people involved. Roads are grouped by the trafficway identifier states report, so the same highway can appear under more than one name. — crashes with unusable coordinates are not shown. Data is public domain; this site is not affiliated with NHTSA or USDOT.

Route check

The route button (next to the crosshair) takes a start and an end, pulls the driving route from the open OSRM router, and counts every death within a quarter mile of the road — total for the drive, the route colored by how deadly each stretch has been, and a list of the stretches where you should be extra careful.

Your corner of the map

Search a town or address (or hit the crosshair for your location) to drop a pin and draw a 1–10 mile ring — the numbers then count only what happened inside it. Drag the pin to move it. On a computer, the ◎ lens does the same thing without the pin: the ring rides along with your cursor, showing only the crashes within reach of it. The ◐ button swaps the dark map for a street map when you need names and buildings. Place lookups go to the open Photon geocoder; your device location is only used to move the map and never leaves your browser.

Basemaps © OpenStreetMap contributors, © CARTO, © OpenFreeMap · rendered with MapLibre GL · dataset built —

Every number here was somebody. Drive like it.