[frithguild]

"A traffic researcher buddy told me that the deaths per mile are actually DOWN, and the reason that the overall death toll is higher is only because the total miles driven is way up. Can anyone confirm that?"

A very true and not publicized fact. It gores nobody's ox.

Best I can do right now is a NYT piece (VERY sorry about the source):
"The fatality rate on highways measured by deaths per mile driven is consistently decreasing. While roughly 42,000 Americans die in traffic accidents each year, the number of vehicles and miles driven have grown steadily every decade. "
http://www.scienceservingsociety.com/p/mics/BroderErrorFixed.htm

[Leonard Evans]

While traffic deaths per mile have indeed declined, the decline is dramatically less than occurred in other countries. If our safety policy had not been so influenced by the agenda of Ralph Nader and his protégé Joan Claybrook, about 200,000 fewer Americans would have been killed in traffic in the last two decades. Our whole focus accepts crashes as inevitable, and sources of litigation wealth. The only really effective way to reduce death in traffic is to reduce the number of crashes -- a simple truism widely accepted outside our litigious society. This is documented in detail in my new book "TRAFFIC SAFETY" (ISBN 0975487108 published August 2004) described at
http://www.scienceservingsociety.com/traffic-safety.htm
The site has the complete text - note particularly “The Dramatic Failure of US Safety Policy” at
http://www.scienceservingsociety.com/ts/text/ch15.htm