About TripRisk
A free, evidence-based tool that calculates the safest driving route using real federal crash data, traffic volumes, live weather, and daylight conditions.
How it works
Every road segment in the United States is scored using five years of NHTSA fatal crash records and FHWA traffic volume data. This produces a fatality rate per vehicle-mile traveled for each segment — the same metric used in transportation safety research and epidemiology.
When you plan a route, TripRisk adjusts these base rates for real-time weather conditions and astronomical daylight calculations at your departure time, then finds the path that minimizes your overall fatality probability.
The result is a per-trip fatality probability grounded in evidence — not heuristics, crowd-sourced reports, or guesswork. For more details, see the methodology page.
The data behind it
NHTSA FARS
Five years of fatal crash records across every US road
FHWA HPMS
Traffic volume (AADT) for millions of road segments
Open-Meteo
Real-time weather conditions along your route
Astronomical data
Sunrise, sunset, and twilight for any location and date
OpenStreetMap
18 GB national road network powering the routing engine
8.7M segments
Every scored road segment in the United States
Principles
- Free for everyone — no account required, no paywalls.
- Privacy-first — no tracking cookies, no personal data collection. See our privacy policy.
- Transparent methodology — every calculation is documented and based on publicly available federal data.
- Informational only — TripRisk helps you understand risk, but no route is guaranteed safe. See our disclaimers.
The creator
TripRisk was built by Mark S., PhD — a computational biologist and data scientist. The same statistical frameworks used to analyze genomic data — exposure-normalized rates, Bayesian estimation, risk quantification — turned out to be exactly what's needed to model driving risk.
TripRisk is funded entirely by donations.
Support TripRisk