Victor J. Blue

Last year, 27 cyclists were hit and killed by drivers on the streets of New York City, up from 10 deaths in 2018. Despite adopting a Vision Zero safety program in 2014 that added 100 miles of protected bike lanes and reduced the citywide speed limit to 25 mph, NYC saw its deadliest year for cyclists since 1999.

We wanted to know more about the ways city drivers and cyclists interact, so we analyzed crash data from 2018 and 2019. Some crashes don’t get documented—no police report is required if there isn’t an injury or at least $1,000 worth of damage—so we looked at crashes where cyclists were injured or killed. Specifically, we dug into the data posted by the NYC OpenData portal, a public database that includes the specifics of every collision involving a motor vehicle.



Although some of what we found may not be news to anyone who has navigated NYC by bike, the data reveals some surprising insights into the consequences of interactions between drivers and cyclists.

For example, if you were hit and injured by a driver while riding your bike in New York City last year, chances are the crash wasn’t your fault. Your odds of surviving that crash depend on whether you caused it and what type of vehicle hit you.

Kory Kennedy using Getty Images

Cyclists die far more often in crashes caused by drivers than when the cyclist is at fault. Police reports also showed that despite being involved in nearly half of crashes, cars killed very few cyclists. SUVs struck about as many cyclists as cars but killed significantly more, and commercial trucks and vans—vehicles involved in fewer than 3 percent of injury crashes—killed the most by a significant margin.

The following analysis doesn’t speculate on the stark rise in fatalities between 2018 and 2019 because the data didn’t show a specific cause for the increase. But it does uncover some illuminating facts about the uneven relationship between drivers and cyclists.

When Drivers Are at Fault, Cyclists Die More Often

In 2019, there were 3,835 crashes in New York City involving cyclists and motorists in which the cyclist was injured or killed, a 3 percent decrease from 2018.

Every police report allows officers to code for apparent “contributing factors,” in which they document circumstances that they believe influenced a crash. The officer must attribute each factor to the party involved—a driver who wasn’t paying attention, for example, or a cyclist who ran a red light. In some crashes, both parties made errors that contributed to the cyclist’s injury.

By analyzing the contributing factors of more than 8,000 crashes, we found that motorists were significantly more likely to be at fault in crashes with cyclists. In 2019, motorists were 2.36 times as likely to be at fault; in 2018, they were 1.77 times as likely.



Kory Kennedy

When we drilled down into the contributing factor data, we found that crashes caused solely by motorists were significantly more deadly. Last year, drivers alone caused 52 percent of crashes with bike riders and 20 cyclist deaths resulted. In 2018, motorists caused 45 percent of crashes; six cyclists were killed in those crashes.

By contrast cyclists were much less likely to be killed when they caused the crash. In 2019, crashes caused by cyclists accounted for 7 percent of all crashes and none of the 27 deaths. In 2018, the cyclists caused 15 percent of crashes and one death resulted.



Kory Kennedy

In some crashes, the police didn’t always specify a contributing factor. Those crashes accounted for a single death in 2018 and four deaths in 2019. Additionally, we excluded cyclist crashes that didn’t involve motorists, which accounted for one death each in 2018 and 2019.

This data reflects a police officer’s initial assessment of a crash, which may vary from the result of the crash investigation performed after the fatal incident. Through Freedom of Information Law requests, we obtained investigation files for 23 of the 37 crashes. The conclusions of the investigations indicate a higher degree of cyclist error than initial police reports. However, in some crashes, we found serious issues with the NYPD’s conclusions, including instances where officers seemed to misunderstand the city’s traffic laws.

For instance, 13-year-old Kevin Flores was found to have caused his own death after a tanker truck driver right-hooked him as he rode through an intersection. The NYPD concluded that Flores, despite having the right of way, should have yielded because the driver couldn’t see him (with no explanation of how Flores could know whether the driver saw him).

In another crash, 23-year-old Australian tourist Madison Jane Lyden was found partially at fault for her own death for being unfamiliar with Manhattan. The investigative files showed that Lyden swerved to avoid a minivan parked in the Central Park West bike lane and got hit by a drunk garbage truck driver operating off of a designated truck route.

When we compared the 23 crash investigations to initial police reports, we found nine cyclists at fault in 2019 and four in 2018. In six of those crashes, we observed questionable conclusions similar to those in Kevin Flores’s and Madison Jane Lyden’s deaths (three cases in 2018 and three in 2019).

In both scenarios, the data indicate that when cyclists screw up, the stakes are lower than when drivers make errors—something they do more often than cyclists. The Mayor’s Office of Operations, the city organization that convenes the Vision Zero Task Force, did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the above data.

Why Drivers Hit Cyclists



We also totaled up the contributing factors in crashes when drivers were found at fault. Distracted driving and failure to yield to right-of-way accounted for 62 percent of those incidents.

Trucks and Vans Are Exceedingly Deadly

Common sense indicates that you’re worse off being struck by a bigger vehicle, and the NYC data we analyzed bear that out. By fact-checking police report information with the crash investigations we obtained, we learned that people driving trucks and vans were involved in 21 of the 37 cyclist deaths in 2018 and 2019.

Large trucks in particular killed 17 cyclists; most deaths weren’t from initial impacts but instead from falling beneath the wheels. In Queens, 45-year-old Aaron Padwee was killed when he fell into the path of a box truck after being doored by another driver. And in a Manhattan crash, 74-year-old Manhattan cyclist Victor Ang rode into the blind spot of a semi-truck driver who was pulling away from a green light.



Kory Kennedy using Getty Images

Those trucks, combined with commercial vans, accounted for just 2.6 percent of the total vehicles in our sample, but were involved in 57 percent of deaths. Put another way, commercial trucks and vans killed 16.2 percent of the cyclists they struck and injured. By comparison, SUVs killed 0.5 percent of the cyclists they hit and injured, and sedans killed 0.1 percent. In terms of fatality rate, trucks and vans are 162 times more lethal than cars.

According to the data we analyzed, SUVs were considerably deadlier than cars. Drivers of both types struck and injured a similar number of cyclists—there were 2,360 SUV/cyclist crashes, and 2,485 car/cyclists crashes. Whereas three cyclists died in crashes with cars, 11 died in crashes with SUVs, making SUVs more than three times as deadly.

Vehicles ordered by percentage of crashes that were fatal:

Kory Kennedy

Moving Vehicles Aren’t the Only Dangers Cyclists Face

Apart from direct crashes with motorists, cyclists riding in New York City faced other dangers on the road. Six cyclists were killed in the past two years after drivers opened doors into them as they rode by. A Brooklyn cyclist, 30-year-old Em Samolewicz, died after she was doored and fell under the wheels of a passing Freightliner.

Environmental factors were also a factor. The data showed 101 cyclists were injured because of the roads themselves. Causes included bad or slippery pavement, debris in the road, traffic control devices, and improper lane marking.

Why These Stats Matter

The data show that when NYC drivers and cyclists mix, cyclists die because of negligent drivers far more often than they do because of their own errors. As cyclists who have seen this data play out first-hand when we’ve tangled with distracted and careless drivers in the city, we believe this inequity underscores the need for better cycling infrastructure.

Specifically, separating cyclists from drivers with protected bike lanes—barriers separating us from cars, not just painted lines that drivers and police officers can easily park in—would mediate the problem. A 2019 study of 12 cities, 77,000 severe injuries and 17,000 fatalities found that cities that had invested in protected bike lanes and multi-use paths saw 44 percent fewer fatal crashes and half as many injuries as cities that didn’t.

Protected bike lanes have faced consistent backlash from politicians and community groups since the city installed the first one on Ninth Avenue in 2007, former NYC DOT commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan wrote in a 2016 New York magazine essay. Opponents say they take up parking spaces and traffic lanes, an unfair inconvenience to the city’s nearly two million drivers.

Nearly 1,000 cyclists staged a “die-in” in Washington Square Park in New York City to raise awareness for the growing number of fatalities in the city on July 9, 2019. Bryan Banducci

Improvements are coming: Last year’s spike in cyclist fatalities prompted City Council Speaker Corey Johnson to draft a $1.7 billion plan to add 250 miles of protected bike lanes to the city’s roads (30 miles in 2021 and 50 miles each subsequent year). The “master plan” will begin in 2021, the same year congestion pricing is expected to kick in Midtown and lower Manhattan. “(These are) two of the most significant investments and behavioral and structural changes to the streets of New York we’ve ever seen,” says Danny Harris, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group focused on promoting cycling, walking, and public transit in the city.

With more than 6,000 miles of roads and about 3 million on-street parking spaces, New York remains a car-centric city, a concrete metropolis designed in Robert Moses’ vision of urban renewal that prioritized the arterial flow of motor vehicles above all else. It should surprise no one that repurposing some pavement for other road users, even those more vulnerable than drivers, will not be easy. In New York, cyclists pay for their bike lanes in blood.

But bike riders aren’t the only ones affected when we redistribute the pavement. “A piece that is lost is that this isn’t a zero sum game,” Harris says, referencing the oversimplification that the push for more bike infrastructure pits cyclists against drivers and doormen and tourists. “When a cyclist or a pedestrian gets killed, they’re New Yorkers who just happen to be walking or biking. We’re all pedestrians.”