I agree, in principle, with your criticism. However, I opted not to slice that differential out at present for two reasons. The first was in the interests of time. I felt it worthy to get this partial rebuttal out in as timely a manner as possible. As I alluded to in the post, parsing the FARS data set is less than ideal. It is impossible to rerun the same query conveniently for different years without fully selecting the filtering criteria for each iteration. Unless I am missing something, there is also no means of generating a report which includes the sub-totals for each sub-query within each annual tabulation. Since I was looking at seven counties, spread across two states and Texas as a whole, you can, I hope, appreciate and forgive the oversight this go ’round.

The other reason is more cynical. You know as well as I that the media and the CIC, facilities whiners are not going to make that distinction. They are going to lump every conceivable demographic into the results in order to prove their point. I will need to revise the narrative to reflect this, but, in a way, I did the same thing. The FARS data set includes two Person Types applicable to this discussion, “Bicyclist” and “Other Cyclist”. Both were included in my analysis. I currently have no idea what an “Other Cyclist” is, but those are among the results – applicable or not.

With the exception of possible skewing with respect to the Harris County numbers, I think one can appreciate the numbers of “cyclists” killed annually – all inclusive of experienced vehicular cyclists, uneducated cyclists, children and “other” cyclists – is so low as to be almost insignificant. Having gotten the general picture released to the wilds, I will delve deeper into the results and perform a more critical analysis. More people died from simply falling than were killed by a motorist while riding their bike in 2006. Nothing is 100% safe and a little perspective is needed.

I trust KXAS will be getting back to you on this.