You might call it morbid fascination, the way people slow down to take a long look at accidents. But it is also cautionary and informative.
In the same way, a lot of motorists might like to know about fatal accidents at dangerous intersections and hazardous freeway segments they use.
Such information is readily available, but the federal government won't let the public have it. It is part of a bigger problem with what critics call the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's culture of secrecy.
The safety administration has routinely blocked access to all kinds of important safety information, including potential safety defects reported by the auto industry to the agency, according to safety advocates.
"The public has a right to know," said Joan Claybrook, president of the watchdog group Public Citizen and a former chief of the safety administration. "After all, the public is the one getting killed and injured."
To be fair, the agency gets sued from all sides, including by the auto industry trying to prevent disclosure of data. Federal privacy laws also limit what the agency can disclose. Nonetheless, some of the agency's actions seem dubious. Consider the issue of where fatal accidents occur.
R.A. Whitworth, whose Maryland-based company conducts highway safety research for attorneys, insurance companies and even government agencies, discovered a few years ago that federal regulators were collecting the global coordinates of fatal accidents and linking them to its database, known as the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, or FARS. The database is one of the most important kept by the federal government.
Almost by happenstance, Whitworth discovered on the agency's website in 2004 the geographic coordinates of fatal accidents. He immediately saw the value: He could create maps of accidents, providing insights into where they were occurring on any given day and under what conditions.
He downloaded the data to his computer, but a few days later it was gone from the website. He called the agency and explained that the data had disappeared and he would like the agency to repost it. Officials called the posting a mistake and said he should erase it from his own computer, he recalled.
Whitworth waited until the following year, to see if the agency would again mistakenly post the data. This time, it did not. So he filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the agency in September 2005. The request was denied.
