Riding a bike in America shouldn't be this dangerous

At about 8:15 a.m. on a Thursday morning in March, Andre Retana, a 13-year-old riding his bike to middle school, pulled up to a red light at the intersection of El Camino Real and Grant Road in Mountain View.

Near two major state highways, the El Camino and Grant crossing is one of the area's busiest and most dangerous sections of roadway. The intersection lacks dedicated bike lanes and other features to protect bicyclists and pedestrians from fast-moving motor vehicle traffic. Instead the intersection is an asphalt-and-concrete love letter to cars. Gas stations occupy two corners; an America's Tire store sits on a third, a BMW dealership on the fourth. Its traffic design, too, prioritizes the efficient movement of cars and trucks over other uses of the road. To keep traffic humming along, motorists on all of its corners are allowed to turn right on red lights.

As Andre approached the intersection's southeast corner, he rode alongside a construction truck waiting at the light to turn right. A police investigation would later determine that the truck had come to a complete stop at the red light. Police say the truck driver, high up in the cab, had never seen Andre, who was in the truck's blind spot.

Then, in a catastrophe of timing, Andre fell off his bike in the crosswalk near the front of the truck — just as the driver, with the light still red, decided it was safe to began turning right. The truck hit Andre. The driver, whose identity has not been released, realized he'd been in a crash only after bystanders flagged him down. The boy on the bike suffered severe injuries, and died in a hospital a short while later.

Police found no evidence of wrongdoing and concluded that the death was an “extremely tragic incident.” They said the driver, whom they described as “devastated,” was not speeding or under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and had executed his right turn legally. Andre, too, appears to have followed all rules of the road.

It is tempting to call what happened that morning in Mountain View a freak accident, the sort of cosmic pileup of time and space that can never be avoided in a complicated world. But as journalist Jessie Singer has argued, in much of American life, many “accidents” are far from accidental — they are instead the inevitable result of political and economic choices that society has made, and they might have been prevented had we made other, safer choices.

States and cities will soon be showered with $1.2 trillion in infrastructure funding that Congress allocated last year. Some traffic safety advocates told me they see this money as a huge opportunity to save our roads — but to make the best use of that money, they said, we have to be willing to think about road safety in a transformative way.

The United States is in the midst of a traffic fatality crisis. Nearly 39,000 people died in motor vehicle crashes on U.S. roadways in 2020, the most since 2007. U.S. roads have grown especially dangerous to “nonoccupants” of vehicles — that is, bicyclists and pedestrians. In 2011, 16% of traffic deaths were of non-occupants; in 2020 it was 20% .

The only way for America to reverse its traffic death spiral is to make a radically different choice. Traffic fatalities have been falling steadily in most of the United States' peer nations, many of which have adopted stricter rules regarding speed limits, seat belts, drunken driving, helmets and vehicle safety standards. Many of our peers have also pulled back from car-focused road design. Now we have a chance to replicate their success.

At the moment, compared to many parts of Europe, walking and riding a bike in the United States is a terrifically dangerous proposition. But these dismal stats can be reversed. Even Amsterdam wasn't always Amsterdam: Until the 1970s, the Dutch bike haven was as cardependent as many other places in the world — and it was only after a fierce activist campaign triggered by hundreds of traffic deaths that Amsterdam decided to adopt bicycle safety as a central part of its urban plan.

American states and cities now have an opportunity to do same. But they must act fast, and they must act decisively. This is no time for half-decadelong action plans.

A week after Andre Retana's death, his parents called in to a Mountain View community meeting with a plea for city officials to rethink road safety.

“He should still be here with us,” Andre's father told officials. “We want something done quicker than 2030.”