Grim news on the New Mexico traffic fatality front, in particular pedestrian deaths.
After having significant trailed to this point the historically high numbers killed in 2016, August 2017 deaths outpaced last year’s in August, continuing a trend that seems to indicate 2015’s low number of deaths to be the true outlier:
Compiling the monthly and annual Traffic Research Unit (TRU) reports from UNM, we now get:
NM Traffic Fatalities:
2006: 484
2007: 413
2008: 366
2009: 361
2010: 349
2011: 351
2012: 366
2013: 311
2014: 386
2015: 298
2016: 404
First Eight Months of 2017: 237
NM Pedestrian Fatalities
2006: 70
2007: 52
2008: 40
2009: 41
2010: 34
2011: 36
2012: 58
2013: 55
2014: 73
2015: 54
2016: 77
First Eight Months of 2017: 47
Of course these figures do not include the two fatalities, one pedestrian, in a particularly deadly morning ABQ commute earlier this week.
Be safe out there, everybody.
P.S.: I also note the first NM “pedalcylist” fatality occurred last month. That incident escaped my attention to this point, or my memory. I’ll do some looking around to find out more.
Better Burque 
How accurate is this data? It seems like there is an important data validation step missing or suspect. Accuracy of the pedestrian and bicycle incident data fed to TRU historically problematic as it is dependent on reporting from entities that sometimes fail to completely follow through. As far as cyclists go, there are at least two more: A young racer, Chad Young that crashed in Tour of Gila in April that didn’t make it; and a fellow hit in the middle of July on Edith just South of I-40 by the cemetery/Martineztown Park.
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SMH: Reporting from TRU would be interesting to follow-up upon, and your observations might be one, of many, reasons why TRU staff are notably reluctant to go “on the record” about pretty much anything. Accuracy is probably pretty far down that list compared with politics, however.
As for Chad Young, perhaps he wasn’t counted due to it being a race, I don’t know, but do you have a link to any story on the Edith fatality? I was out of town during mid-July and didn’t see any information on that one.
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[…] to work, and work together, to significantly address it. BB tires of noting it over, and over and over. It’s well past time to […]
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