In jschonem/FARSdatatools: Manipulation of Data from Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS)

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
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library(FARSdatatools)

The object of this package is to provide users with tools to analyze data compiled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) via the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). All publicly available FARS data is accessible here.

The specific data set for which this package is designed is available for download here. THE USER MUST PLACE THESE DATA FILES IN THE CURRENT WORKING DIRECTORY IN ORDER FOR THE FUNCTIONS IN THIS PACKAGE TO ACCESS THEM.

NOTE: The specific data set linked above only contains data for the years 2013, 2014, and 2015.

The primary tools provided by this package are the functions

fars_summarize_years
fars_map_state

Additionally, the helper functions

fars_read
make_filename
fars_read_years

are made available to the user.

All functions (including the helper functions) are documented fully in the man files. This documentation can be easily accessed from the console using the ? operator, e.g. ?fars_read. This vinnette focuses on elaborating on the use of fars_summarize_years and fars_map_state.

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fars_summarize_years

The fars_summarize_years function takes a single input parameter years. This value may be a single year or a vector/list of years so long as all values are integers, numeric, or character strings which are coercible to one of the integers 2013, 2014, or 2015. It then summarizes for each value in years the monthly accident totals for that year. It does this by extracting data from a file of accident records for user-specified years and using various methods from the dplyr and tidyr packages (members of tidyverse) to return a summary data table as a tibble. For example, the result of calling fars_summarize_years(c(2013,2015)) is a 12x3 tibble with column names c("MONTH","2013","2015") where the "MONTH" column contains the integers from 1 to 12 enumerating the month and the "2013" and "2015" columns contain the corresponding monthly accident totals for those years.

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fars_map_state

The fars_map_state function takes two two input parameters, state.num and year. The year is the year for which data is desired and the state.num parameter is a unique identifying number (FIPS code) for a state. The function uses these parameters to retrieve accident location (longitude and latitued) data for the specified year and state and plots a scatter plot of the coordinates superimposed on a simple state map allowing the user to quickly acertain the spacial distribution of traffic accidents for the given year and state.

jschonem/FARSdatatools documentation built on Feb. 15, 2021, 12:13 a.m.