THE most improbable bike path in the world is surely on the MacArthur causeway, a road connecting Miami Beach with the city of Miami proper. The road—more a motorway really—has six wide lanes of traffic and a speed limit of 50mph. This being Florida, and speed limits apparently only loosely enforced, in light traffic people travel far faster. And yet driving across it today, your correspondent spotted a lonely cyclist working his way up the road against the traffic. Along the road’s right-hand side, unseparated from the traffic by any physical barriers, was a thin cycle path. Your correspondent in his day-to-day life cycles everywhere. In Washington, DC, turning left on a main road can be dicey if drivers are not patient. In London, racing lorries at the Elephant and Castle roundabout and the Vauxhall interchange both provided daily adrenaline rushes. Yet he would no more cycle along the MacArthur causeway than he would take up bullfighting. It would be utterly insane.

In 2012 some 120 cyclists were killed in traffic accidents across Florida. That is as many as were killed in Britain in the same year–a country with three times as many people as Florida and a lot more cyclists. Florida’s death rate for cyclists is three times higher than the national rate. The rate for pedestrians is twice the national rate: 476 pedestrians were also killed in 2012. According to the Dangerous By Design survey, an annual report produced by the National Complete Streets Coalition, a lobby group, the state’s four biggest cities–Miami, Jacksonville, Tampa-St Petersburg and Orlando–are the four most dangerous places to be a pedestrian in America.

Such deaths are not inevitable: over the past few decades, traffic deaths in general have declined spectacularly–from almost 55,000 in 1972 to 33,000 in 2012. Much of these gains however have come from better-designed cars. Airbags, seatbelts, crumple zones and the like have all made cars safer for their drivers and passengers. Pedestrians and cyclists have only benefited in so far as cars have become harder to crash. As a result, though the number of pedestrian deaths has declined, it has done so much less than the number of deaths of car drivers and passengers. Over the past decade, the share of pedestrians as a percentage of all traffic deaths has risen from around 11% to around 15%.

What kills pedestrians is the poor design of roads and cities. The unseparated cycle path along the MacArthur expressway is one notable example–but in fact the bigger problem is often the lack of cycle lanes at all. Florida’s cities are routinely dangerous, because they are designed for cars, not people. Traffic lanes are too wide, encouraging drivers to go faster than they should. Pavements (or sidewalks) are narrow or often missing. High-speed highways go through the centre of cities, forcing people who do not drive to cross enormous stretches of tarmac to get to the shops or their places of work. Florida’s cities are especially bad because–like in many places in the south–they are fairly new, and so they never went through a stage of development before the car when it was necessary to build walkable streets.

At least Florida now seems to understand the problem. Last year the state published a safety plan to try to reduce the accident rate, and it has hired several staff to try to look out for the interests of cyclists and pedestrians. The trouble is that the state’s entire economic model is built on breakneck growth–all fuelled by cars. Despite the continuing economic doldrums, the state’s population is growing at almost twice the national rate. All of those new suburbs have to be connected to cities. And building safe streets is more expensive than building crude roads. As long as the growth continues then, so too will the deaths.

(Photo credit: EMMANUEL DUNAND / AFP)