Residents who want to know how dangerous the roads near their homes are now have a new tool. The Maryland Department of Transportation Motor Vehicle Administration’s Highway Safety Office has launched a statewide crash data dashboard that maps reported crashes of every severity and updates every morning.
The new tool, announced Oct. 15, covers crashes across Maryland, including those that cause serious injuries, and sits alongside the office’s existing fatal crash dashboard. The Highway Safety Office built it with the Maryland State Police using data from the State Police’s Automated Crash Reporting System and data warehouse.
For Southern Maryland readers, the most useful feature is the jurisdiction filter. A heat map shows where crashes cluster, and users can narrow it by county, severity, year, month and time period.
What the dashboard shows
- Crash characteristics: driver behaviors, injury severity and crashes involving pedestrians, cyclists and other non-motorists.
- Emphasis areas: filters that summarize crashes tied to specific driver behaviors, non-motorist involvement or work zones.
- Daily updates: new reports are added each morning across all severity levels.
“Access to comprehensive crash data is essential as we work with the public, safety partners and decisionmakers,” said Motor Vehicle Administrator Chrissy Nizer, who also serves as Gov. Wes Moore’s highway safety representative. She said the dashboard will help identify crash trends, including those resulting in serious injuries.
Deaths are down this year
The state’s fatal crash dashboard, updated Oct. 16, showed 339 reported traffic deaths in Maryland so far in 2026, down from 395 at the same point in 2025, a drop of about 14%.
Not every category is improving. Earlier this month the Chronicle reported that motorcyclist deaths had reached 60, already more than in all of 2025. Calvert, Charles and St. Mary’s counties also recently received state highway safety funds.
Read the fine print
The state cautions that all crash data is subject to change, and its dashboard FAQ lists several limits:
- The dashboard counts only approved crash reports, while the fatal dashboard also includes open investigations, so the two may not match.
- Data for 2022 and 2023 is still preliminary, and no year is ever formally closed.
- A 2024 upgrade to the state crash reporting system changed how distracted driving is recorded, so the 2024 drop in distracted-driving crashes should not be compared directly with earlier years.
- The dashboard cannot be filtered by road name; State Police offer separate tools with road and GPS data.
The state recommends that anyone using the numbers note the date they pulled them and recheck later, since counts change as reports are filed and updated.
