I happened upon upon a post on the Bike Bis blog, referencing the 2007 annual report on bicycle fatalities (pdf). Of note in the report is the fact that
bicycle fatalities across the U.S. dropped for a second straight year in 2007 to 698 deaths, representing a 9.5% decrease from the previous year.
For Rhode Island, the bicycle statistics are
1 fatalities; 1.4% of total traffic fatalities; 0.95 deaths per 1 million population;
The NHTSA reports there were a total of 69 traffic fatalities in 2007. When you factor in the fact that there were 13 pedestrian fatalities, this means that just over 20% of the fatalities were inflicted upon non-motorized forms of travel. My friends, this is simply unacceptable. I have yet to be able to find the dollar amount spent for safety projects in Rhode Island, but I highly doubt we would see that 20% of those dollars are put towards increasing pedestrian a cyclist safety. Does anyone have pointers to this information?