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Would it help to use data like yearly per capita consumption of gasoline by state [1] (as a proxy for miles driven per person) in addition to the existing data?

• yaakov34 10y ago
  You can get vehicle miles driven by state directly, and also such data as fatalities per road user and per miles driven: http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalityfacts/state-by-state-overview http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit... However, you won't get much insight from plotting this data geographically: a table (as in that link) is enough. Basically you get exactly what is expected: Daniel Patrick Moynihan's "Law of the Canadian Border" - southern states have more social problems. If you want high-resolution geographical data for purposes such as finding problem roads, that would be a lot more difficult - you need to have a graph of the road network (from e.g. Open Street Map), with traffic data attached to the arcs of the network (I don't know of any public access databases like that, although such data is commercially available for road planning) plus accident locations accurately mapped to the roads. I suspect it wouldn't be a quick project to do.
• fastaguy88 10y ago
  There is something clearly very wrong with this data, since is suggests that California has less than 1/10th the per capita consumption of New York, and uses less fuel on an absolute basis than Connecticut. The dynamic range in fuel consumption differs only 2 fold for the top 46 (of 51) states, but then drops more than 5 fold. Those last 5 numbers must be on a different scale.