The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released the 2009 Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) results. Both pedalcyclist fatalities and injuries were down. The former by 12% and the later by 1.9%. Which is something to cheer about. The 630 fatalities is only one more than the lowest single year total of 629 in 2003, and continues a general trend of pedalcyclist fatalities.
A trend made all the more impressive since bicycle trips have more than doubled from 1.7 billion in 1990 to 4 billion in 2009.
It's hard to say what is the force behind this downward trend, though less drinking and driving, fewer VMT by car and the network effect of more cyclists are all good guesses. Unfortunately, as LAB points out, guesses are all we have:
NHTSA published a table that includes a line for the fatality rate, showing fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles travels. This line shows that fatalities are down even when reduced VMT is taken into account. But what about cyclists? Once again we run in data collection problems. While the DOT carefully estimates auto VMT, we are still stuck with feeble data on bicycling rates — and none have been released for 2009.
DC saw an overall drop of 15% in traffic fatalities in 2009.
There were zero bicycle fatalities in DC in 2009, a trend that unfortunately has not held for 2010. 
Not too surprising. Speculating from the armchair, the vast majority of reportable injuries are crashes by the cyclist sans motor vehicle. The vast majority of cyclist fatalities involve a motor vehicle. So if motor vehicles are traveling less or behaving more safely for some other reason, we would see an improvement in cycling fatalities. As for injuries, some of it may be "safer cars". But I suspect that as cycling becomes more popular, that there is an inherant difference in new cyclists in that they are relatively more risk adverse and consequently take less risks.
Posted by: Geof Gee | September 10, 2010 at 11:30 AM