I just looked at the 2007 national road stats on fatalities and injuries -- and Florida wins the dubious bicyclist fatality "award" again for having the highest bicyclist fatality rate in the country and also having the highest raw number of bicyclists killed in 2007.
Florida had 119 bicyclists killed in 2007 -- tops in the country. Second was California with 109 bicyclist fatalities even though California has twice the population of Florida.
The total number of bicyclists killed in the country was 698 in 2007. Florida had 28 percent of all the bicyclist fatalities in the U.S. in '07.
Florida also had 6.52 bicyclists killed per million population -- about three times the national average of 2.31. Second and third behind Florida in bicyclist fatality rates were Louisiana at 5.12 and South Carolina at 4.54 per million.
The numbers are from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). They were sent to me by Jeanette Rouse at the local DOT office.
In 2007, 698 bicyclists were killed and another 44,000 were injured nationwide. The highest number of bicyclists killed in the country was 1,003 in 1975 and there were 814 bicyclists killed in 1997.
Bicyclists accounted for 13 percent of all nonoccupant traffic fatalities in 2007 and the 698 bicyclist deaths accounted for 2 percent of the 41,049 traffic fatalities nationwide during the year.
One-seventh -- 15 percent -- of all the bicyclists killed in traffic crashes in '07 were kids between 5 and 15.
Alcohol involvement -- either for the driver or the bicyclist -- was reported in more than one-third of the traffic crashes that resulted in bicyclist fatalities nationwide.
Five states did not have a single bicyclist killed in 2007: Delaware, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota and Vermont.
More than 52,000 bicyclists have been killed in the U.S. since 1932, the first year that estimates of bicyclist fatalities were recorded.
Here's the sad story of a cyclist in Virginia killed by a driver..
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