The Importance of Traffic Crash Reports for National Databases
Kenneth W. Rutland, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration,  krutland@nhtsa.dot.gov
Telephone:  (202) 493-0055

This presentation will address current status of traffic crash reports, known as Police Accident Reports or PARs, how they are used in national databases such as FARS, how a National Uniform Traffic Crash Report would affect data collection, and potential impacts (pros/cons) of this uniformity.  A panel discussion will address some of the challenges envisioned to move toward this method of reporting crashes nationwide through a common data collection structure.