Get car repair estimates from RepairPal or Driverside

TechCrunch reviews RepairPal, a service that promises to make it easier to know what car repairs should cost. TechCrunch summarizes the need:

Going to the mechanic is like going to the doctor. When something needs to be fixed, for most people there is no easy way to tell if they are being charged the going rate or are being ripped off. Enter RepairPal, a new site launching publicly today where you can get price estimates for different parts and repair jobs for your car. You enter your car year, model, and mileage, and it spits out price ranges for your zip code.

Another similar site that launched recently, also reviewed by TechCrunch, is DriverSide.

[thanks to Jim Malone for the tip]

TrafficSTATS

At TrafficSTATS (STAtistics on Travel Safety) you explore the risk of suffering a brutal, untimely death in a vehicle depending on such factors as your age, your gender, the time of day and the day of the week, the region where you live and your chosen mode of transportation. The traffic data is from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System and the National Household Travel Survey. There's a tutorial and a sample report (PDF). It's a joint project of Carnegie Mellon University and the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

National Traffic and Road Closure Information

National Traffic and Road Closure Information is a federal portal to traffic information. The Kentucky and Indiana pages, for example, link to TRIMARC, the Louisville's traffic monitor. There are also links to other traffic-related sites.

Frequently stolen cars

The National Insurance Crime Bureau offers state-by-state listings of the most frequently stolen cares. It doesn't bode well for Kentucky that its most frequently stolen vehicle is the 1986 Oldsmobile Cutlass.

Shipwreck database

The Office of Coast Survey's Automated Wreck and Obstruction Information System (AWOIS) "contains information on over 10,000 submerged wrecks and obstructions in the coastal waters of the United States. Information includes latitude and longitude of each feature along with brief historic and descriptive details." You can download the data as an Access database or Adobe Acrobat PDF file.