MarvinBregiosa/us-truck-fatalities-fars-2018-2024

US Truck Fatalities (FARS) — 2018–2024

Row-level dataset of every fatal motor-vehicle crash in the United States, 2018–2024, where at least one vehicle was a medium or heavy truck (FARS BODY_TYP codes 60–69). Filtered from NHTSA's Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) National CSV downloads.

Published interactive report based on this data: 👉 Vision Zero Report Card 2026 — accidentlawyerreview.com

Reproducible Python pipeline (the join script that produced this CSV from raw FARS zips): github.com/MarvinBregiosa/vision-zero-fars

Related publications:

• Build notes + bugs (Astro + Python): dev.to write-up
• Policy framing: Vision Zero is failing in 8 of 17 cities, on Medium
• On DOIs for indie data: From CSV to citable, on Hashnode
• Permanent DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20487070 — Zenodo archive of this same dataset.

What's in the dataset

truck_fatal_crashes_2018_2024.csv — 33,898 rows, 9 columns:

Column	Type	Description
year	int	Calendar year (2018–2024)
state	int	FARS state FIPS code
state_name	str	State name (e.g. "California")
city_code	int	FARS city FIPS code (0 if outside any incorporated city)
city_name	str	City name (empty if outside any city)
st_case	int	FARS state-case unique ID within the year
fatals	int	Number of fatalities in this crash
latitude	float	Crash latitude (WGS-84)
longitude	float	Crash longitude

Definition of "truck-involved"

Medium and heavy commercial trucks per FARS BODY_TYP coding:

Code	Description
60	Step van / walk-in van
61	Single-unit straight truck or HAZMAT placard truck
62	Single-unit straight truck (10,001–19,500 lb GVWR)
63	Single-unit straight truck (19,501–26,000 lb GVWR)
64	Single-unit straight truck (>26,000 lb GVWR)
65	Single-unit straight truck (GVWR unknown)
66	Medium/heavy pickup (>10,000 lb GVWR)
67	Unknown medium/heavy truck type
68	Truck-tractor (semi/combination, any weight)
69	Unknown if single-unit or combination

Passenger pickups under 10,000 lb GVWR are excluded — that's the standard NHTSA / IIHS truck-crash definition.

Headline finding from the report

Of 17 US cities that formally adopted Vision Zero, only 10 cut truck-involved fatalities from a 2018–2019 baseline to the 2023–2024 average. 8 saw them rise. New York City — the first major US Vision Zero adopter (2014) — saw truck deaths rise +13.1% over the same period.

The full ranked report with sortable tables, per-city sparklines, and methodology lives at accidentlawyerreview.com/research/vision-zero-report-card.

Reproducing the filtered dataset from raw FARS

git clone https://github.com/MarvinBregiosa/vision-zero-fars
cd vision-zero-fars

mkdir -p data
for yr in 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024; do
  curl -o "data/FARS${yr}NationalCSV.zip" \
    "https://static.nhtsa.gov/nhtsa/downloads/FARS/${yr}/National/FARS${yr}NationalCSV.zip"
  unzip -d "data/" "data/FARS${yr}NationalCSV.zip"
done

python3 analyze.py

Caveats before you build models on this

• Small annual counts at the city level are noisy. Most cities have single-digit truck-fatality counts per year. Aggregate across years before drawing conclusions.
• City boundaries vary. FARS uses FIPS city codes; through-route crashes at city limits sometimes attribute to the surrounding county instead of the city, so urban truck-deaths are likely undercounted for cities with major interstate-through-routes.
• 2024 is the FARS Annual Report File (preliminary), released April 2026. The Final File will replace it in 2027 and may revise individual counts slightly.
• Geocoding quality varies. Lat/lon is populated for ~98% of crashes but precision varies by state (some rural states snap to road midpoints).

License & attribution

Released under CC BY 4.0. If you use the data, please cite:

AccidentLawyerReview Editorial Team. Vision Zero Report Card 2026: Truck Deaths in 19 Major US Cities. Published 27 May 2026. https://accidentlawyerreview.com/research/vision-zero-report-card/

About

AccidentLawyerReview is an independent public-data directory of US personal-injury law firms. The Crash Atlas series — including this Vision Zero Report Card — is a sister data-research project published alongside the directory. Not a law firm. Not legal advice.