Psy 409a
15 min Oral Report
Site Navigation
When I first went on the FARS web page, I thought it was really organized. When you first look at the Website, on the very top it gives some interesting g facts about single and two-vehicle crashes. It said, “Regardless of crash severity, the majority of vehicles in single- and two-vehicle crashes were going straight prior to crash. The next most common vehicle maneuver differed by crash severity: negotiating a curve for fatal crashes, turning left for injury crashes, and stopped in traffic for property-damage-only crashes. (FARS) It also had a link to go to their archives for more interesting facts. After this section, it had a chart of the National Statistics for motor vehicle traffic crashes, which you can see here.
After this, there was another interesting section on statistics of anything you would need to know about traffic incidents. However, what I thought was interesting is how they had a car dashboard and on this was links to different car related links.
Overall Interest
I really thought that this site was very easy to navigate through. Other then the things that I have just mentioned, on the left of the page are subtopics about other reports, query, and requests for interested individuals. The one topic that I thought was really useful was the section on acronyms. It gave many definitions on common used acronyms in the automobile business. I thought it was also very useful for beginners trying to read some of the information on this site. There was many acronyms that I also didn’t know, however, clicking on this link really helped me.
Getting a mental map of the Website wasn’t very hard to do. The Website wasn’t very extensive, thus making the site very enjoyable. For me, I really hate going to websites that are really cluttered. This site was well organized and I must commend the Webmaster for doing such a good job.
The general information is displayed in the middle of the Website and the subtopics were listed on the side. For me, I thought the subtopics was more informational then the main topics. They broke down individual sections of vehicle accidents and I thought this was very useful.
General Content
The general content of this Website was to give the reader a better idea of many crashes happening every year. The Website did this by giving a lot of general information about vehicle crashes from 1994-1999. I also noticed that the number of fatal crashes has increased over the six years that were listed. This was probably due to the number of miles that people have driven. It seems as though the number of miles people are driving every year has increased. This could be a major problem especially with the increasing oil prices.
The sponsors of this page are NHTSA. NHTSA decided in 1996 to make FARS data easier to obtain by using Internet technology. This FARS Web-Based Encyclopedia offers a more intuitive and powerful approach for retrieving fatal crash information.
Specific Content
The one section that I want to talk about is the section called create a map. I really enjoyed this section and I also that I was very interesting. When you first click on the link it shows a map of the United States. Then you have to click on the state that you’re interested in. Then there are may subsections that you can choose from. However, I chose the section on vehicle fatalities. I clicked on Hawaii and noticed that we ranked very low with an average of 90 per year. The states that were high were California and Texas. They both had the most traffic fatalities with 3,108 and 3,148. This substantial difference is probably due to the number of drivers they have on the road. So over all, I think we rank pretty high considering the number of drivers we have on the road compared to these bigger states. This was a very interesting and informational site and I would recommend this site to anyone that is interested in car fatality statistics.