Biker Safety
These Are the Most Dangerous States for Cyclists
Kaia Hubbard, May 12, 2021
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/these-are-the-most-dangerous-states-for-cyclists
These are the most dangerous states for cyclists, according to StreetLight:
1. Delaware
2. South Carolina
3. Florida
These are the states with the highest bicyclist fatalities per capita:
1. Florida
2. Delaware
3. Louisiana
After another bicyclist was seriously injured on a Delaware road, what comes next?
Jeff Neiburg, News Journal - 6/7/2021
The national average of bicycle deaths via motor vehicle accident has hovered around 2.5 per 1 million people over the last 10 years or so, according to data from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
In 2019, a record seven bicyclists were killed in motor vehicle accidents in Delaware, a state with a population of less than one million.
Only Florida ranked higher in deaths per capita in 2019, according to a report from Streetlight Data, a San Francisco-based company that specializes in collecting data to inform transportation decisions. But Streetlight also calculated deaths per bike miles traveled. In that formula, no state was more dangerous for bicyclists that year than Delaware.
The Delaware bicycle deaths in 2019 were not in high-density urban areas like Wilmington, Newark and Dover. They occurred along suburban roadways and on the always-dangerous Coastal Highway, where speed limits for vehicles are higher and bicyclists have less protection.
"There is a bike path paralleling 141," she said, "but the problem is the transitions going from road to trail to road, across a driveway… all of those transitions are risks whereas if a biker is on the road and acting like a vehicle, that biker’s actions are a lot more predictable."
The impression from the Delaware Online article is that the PA teenager was biking in the bike lane until she was making a left turn to Plantation Rd southbound. So, she departed the bike lane and moved toward the center of Shady Rd. She didn't see the truck towing a trailer and thought she was going behind the truck, but she hit the trailer being towed by the truck.
A big problem is the bike lanes are not connected.
A biker, a former federal highway engineer, said that the roundabout in front of Beebe has no provision for bikers.
In June of 2021, on Rt 24 westbound, a Biker Detour sign routes bikers to Banks Rd, one of the most treacherous roads around even for cars!
The local bikers may know the danger of biking here, but visitors, like the PA woman who died, may not know the danger of biking in Delaware.