Not an Accident: Another Bicyclist is Killed by Our Streets

A 62-year-old woman was killed yesterday morning while crossing North Claiborne at Laffitte Ave by or on the Greenway.

She did everything she was supposed to do. She stopped at the intersection, waited, and proceeded with caution. A driver in one lane even yielded to let her pass. And still—she was killed.

Another driver moving through the adjacent lane never stopped, resulting in a fatality. This wasn’t an accident, it was infrastructure doing exactly what it was designed to do.

North Claiborne is engineered for speed, not for human life. Cars regularly move 60–80 mph through a dense urban corridor. There’s no protected bike lanes or safe extended crosswalks for pedestrians. The very infrastructure that creates traffic calming.

Bicycle fatalities on Claibore are the predictable results of infrastrucure created soley for motor vehicles. Claiborne has been thoroughly privatized for the oil and auto industries—designed to move vehicles as quickly as possible, at the expense of vulnerable road users. Meanwhile, pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit riders are forced into dangerous, fragmented space.

We are demanding something different:
• Protected, separated bike lanes along Claiborne Ave.
• Extended and raised crosswalks for pedestrians.
• Bus boarding islands like the one on St. Louis and Basin.
• Real traffic calming infrastructure that makes it impossible to drive highway speeds through our neighborhoods.

But in truth we know that traffic violence is not random—it’s a symptom of infrastructure.

Every “shared road” without protection is a risk imposed on the public for the benefit of speed and profit. The oil industry makes billions from this system. But our communities pay with our lives.

Any truly great city is one where you don’t need to own a car. That means building a full, citywide network of protected bike lanes and safe, reliable public transit, starting with corridors like Claiborne.

This woman should still be alive.

We can build a city where this doesn’t keep happening. But only if we are willing to take space back from cars and return it to the people.