New Orleans Bicycle Fatality Map

According to data from the League of American Bicyclists, the United States has reached yet another grim milestone. Bicyclist deaths rose from an already record-setting 1,117 in 2022 to 1,166 in 2024—a 5.5% increase in only two years. This is not an accident; it is the inevitable consequence of a transportation system engineered for the supremacy of the automobile over human life.

In New Orleans, the crisis is even more acute. As Axios has reported, our city leads all major U.S. metro areas in the rate of fatal bicyclist crashes. Between 2017 and 2021, there were on average 9.9 fatal bike crashes per million residents—more than three times the national average of 2.7 during that same period. The League of American Bicyclists, drawing on National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data, notes this represents an 11% increase from 2012–2016.

These numbers are not abstract; they are the ledger of lives lost to infrastructure that treats streets as corridors for profit and speed, not as the shared commons of the people. In light of this grim reality, we must organize to transform symbolic illusions of progress like painted bike lanes. We want to see:

• Extended crosswalks to safeguard pedestrians and shorten the deadly gauntlet of wide car lanes.

• Physically separated bike lanes with a concrete barrier—not the painted line that doesn’t protect us, nor the false illusions of plastic flex posts, but fortifications that recognize that our lives are worth more than convenience for motorists.

• Floating bus stops where transit boarding occurs in front of the bike lane, freeing cyclists from the perpetual obstruction of stopped buses in the bike lane and allowing all modes of transport to coexist without conflict.