The NHTSA released 2007 traffic stats last week. Summary .pdf
The big news certainly is “the fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled was 1.37, the lowest fatality rate on record”, though Arizona despite posting a drastic improvement, will remain substantially higher (more dangerous) than US averages for both 100M VMT and per capita rates.
Arizona posted a huge drop (18%), as was already reported (arizona-2007-traffic-fatalities-plummet). It makes me wonder why there was a large increase (9%) the previous year(2006-fatality-stats-final). The usual explanations, for the drop, were proferred — tougher DUI stuff, etc. but it doesn’t seem to me that had very long to kick in, e.g. the interlock. Maybe just lots of noise in the numbers?
Out of the 41,059 killed on U.S. roads in 2007 the vast majority (85%) were either driving or a passenger in a motor vehicle. Just under 5,000 were pedestrians, and 772 (that is, less than 2%) were cyclists.
Cyclist fatalities remain a small portion of a much bigger problem.
Here are the top-level numbers:
- passenger vehicles:28933 (16,520 cars / 12,413 light truck & SUV)
- large trucks: 802
- motorcycles: 5154
- pedalcyclists:698
- Pedestrians: 4654
- other/unknown: 152
Pedalcylist year-over-year fatals were down significantly, 9.6%. 2006 year-over-year was also down, though just 1.7% — still a hopeful sign of a trend.
The NRD-NHTSA State-by-state site does not yet have 2007 numbers.
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