Consumer Federation of America’s work on raising awareness of, and pushing back against, the trend toward allowing off-highway vehicles (OHVs) on roads depends upon analyzing and sharing information that is useful and accessible.  Most OHV fatalities take place on roads because OHVs are not designed to be driven on roads.  Yet CFA has documented a trend of states allowing OHVs on roads, either directly or via local authorization.  This is due in no small part to a lack of information about how dangerous this behavior is on the part of the public and decision makers.  Our priority is to share the information we have as broadly as possible. No other entity has compiled this data and shared it with the public.

We find ourselves with an embarrassment of riches including original legal research, OHV fatality data collected by CFA’s  Off-Highway Vehicle Safety Coalition and by government agencies, press releases and press clips and more than 50 letters explaining the dangers of OHVs on roads sent to localities, as well as a collection of press and research resources. Therefore, we needed a centralized and organized repository for this work.

Our solution is to organize all of this information on a microsite within CFA’s website.  Tagged as Consumer Information on our Off-Highway Vehicles page, the microsite’s main page provides an overview of our coalition and our work, with each section providing a link to another layer of specific information.

Through this new microsite, a visitor can look at the front page and see that we documented 530 OHV fatalities in 2014, 504 in 2015, and 28 as of February 8, 2016—with an explanation that these numbers will likely increase as we obtain more information.  If so inclined the visitor can click the link for more information at the end of that section and find graphs breaking out data points from the previous month’s fatality data.

Or, if the visitor is interested in the legal landscape surrounding the issue of OHVs on roads, they can look at the map on the front page which indicates which states allow OHVs on public roads.

If the visitor hasn’t found everything they need, they can click more information and be brought to more in-depth information including a break down of where the coalition has sent letters in opposition to proposals that would allow or expand OHV on-road use, and research showing that OHVs are unsuitable for use on any roads not just paved roads.

We hope you will take a moment to look through our new microsite and share it with others. If you know of a proposal to allow OHVs on roads, or your group would like to work on opposing the use of OHVs on roads please contact me at mbest@consumerfed.org.