safe travels

We're all trying to get outside and move more, but for multiple reasons, pedestrian and cyclist deaths have reached a 40-year high. Here's what experts say needs to change to save lives—plus, how you can protect yourself.

- BY ELISSA GARAY

There was a weariness in Rose Quinn's eyes as she rolled out the bicycle—spray-painted solid white, from seat to spokes to sprigs of flowers—and propped it up on the grassy curbside patch where it would remain, an enduring curiosity to passersby. It was a ritual of which Quinn had been the reluctant ringmaster some half-dozen times in and around her Hudson Valley, NY, home-town. The city’s latest “ghost bike” was in tribute to Christine “Rena” Tarasco, a 65-year-old retired waitress who had been struck and killed by a car here while out cycling two days after Christmas in 2022.

“Ghost bikes represent the human being who once was there,” she told a small crowd gathered for the commemoration on the third Sunday in November last year—that’s the date the United Nations designated 20 years ago as World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims. Quinn believes ghost bikes help draw attention to the dangers riders face in what she calls “unforgivingly dangerous streets.”

Roughly 45,000 Americans are lost on U.S. roadways each year—drivers, walkers, and runners as well as cyclists, Quinn says, a stat that's in line with U.S. National Safety Council data on preventable traffic deaths for 2022. “This is what traffic violence does to people,” says Quinn.

a PUBLIC SAFETY issue