Here is and Arizona Republic story about more crash statistics. This dataset is from a MAG (Maricopa Association of Governments) Transportation Safety Committee report, so one assumes it covers Maricopa County (Phoenix, Tempe, Mesa, Glendale, et al).
The number of fatal crashes is listed (e.g. 509 in 2006) but not the number of fatalities (This just struck me as an odd way to report it. The full explanation and link to all the numbers is below in the comment). The number of crashes has been pretty flat. The increase in fatalities seems to be driven mainly by more single-vehicle crashes. A wildcard would be how will the large decrease in just-highway fatalities reported by DPS for 2007 fit in?
Unmentioned in the story was some encouraging news for cyclists. The number of bicyclist crashes and injuries is down sharply over the study period — about a 30% reduction. Fatalities were mostly flat but are so small they fluctuate a lot, so trends aren’t readily discernible.
It appears that the terminology that we have used at our website to report the crash experience in the Phoenix metropolitan region needs some explanation. A Fatal Crash is defined as a crash in which one or more persons have died as a result of the injuries they sustained. Fatalities for a given year is the sum total of all persons killed in crashes during that year. Contrary to the comment here, we have reported both these numbers at our website at: http://www.mag.maricopa.gov/detail.cms?item=8664
The article by Glen Creno has reported the increase in fatal crashes accurately. The fatalities from 1999 to 2006 went from 437 to 570 — an increase of 30.4 percent.
mag as a percent of state
bike total injury fatal injuries fatalities
2004 70.6% 70.8% 63.0% 71.0% 63.0%
2005 68.9% 66.2% 71.4% 68.6% 71.4%
2006 67.7% 67.9% 70.0% 67.9% 72.4%
ped
2004 70.4% 74.5% 50.8% 69.7% 50.4%
2005 69.5% 66.4% 54.0% 68.4% 53.7%
2006 68.0% 71.1% 60.1% 69.3% 58.2%