Five Years of Traffic Fatalities

Every year the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration releases a massive set of data collected for each recorded vehicle crash where there was a fatality.  They do it to allow groups to perform their own analysis with the goal of increasing awareness and ultimately decreasing fatalities.
Nathan Yau did a fascinating segmentation of an entire year to illustrate some insightful trends.  Inspired by Nathan's work, I wondered if there were more or different patterns of risk that might repeat themselves over a longer period, so I downloaded five years of it to get a big enough set to look at what time of the day or night is especially prone to fatal traffic incidents from a day-of-the-week perspective and also from a time-of-year perspective.
Finally, I did some basic segmentation mapping to get a rough geographic sense of where rates of different sorts of accidents were more or less likely to occur (take these with a grain of salt).

Structure abounds in traffic fatality data.

Incidentally, every one of these charts is a simple Excel pivot table -including the so called maps.  More on fake mapping here.  Click on the image to get a readable version.

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