In Houston, bicycling is known as a killer sport.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

http://www.houstonpress.com/2009-10-08/news/ghost-riders/



According to data compiled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Houston is almost always the most dangerous place in Texas to ride a bike. The NHTSA's Fatality Analysis Reporting System — a breakdown of every fatal accident reported from every police jurisdiction each year — tells a forbidding story. From 1994 to 2008, with the exceptions of 2004 and 2006, Houston's cycling fatality numbers — on average, about 15 deaths a year — equal or exceed those of all other surveyed Texas municipalities combined.

There is also lots of anecdotal evidence. Veteran bike messengers will show you their scars, and it's hard to find a cycling commuter with several years on the roads who hasn't had a run-in or two with a car or dangerous pothole. All of them will tell you that drivers here are at best inattentive and at worst aggressive, and that it gets worse the farther from the city's core you go. Longtime cycling activist Dan Lundeen frequently rides from downtown to Fulshear and Richmond. He says the city's ring roads correspond to levels of danger for cyclists, with the Inner Loop being the safest, inside the Beltway a step down and beyond Highway 6/FM 1960 the worst.

A map compiled by suburban bike commuter Peter Wang, admittedly drawn from incomplete data, would seem to bear out Lundeen's premise. Wang's data comes from the In Memoriam section of the message boards at the Web site of local advocacy group BikeHouston, to which locals send news clippings of every fatal accident covered in local media.

Only ten of the 44 fatal ­incidents took place inside the Loop.

Cycle shop owners will tell you that the number one factor stopping more people from biking in Houston is simple fear. This is a city built for cars, and the residents are hardwired to the rhythms of the internal combustion engine. "Some people are afraid of cars, justified or not," Wurth says. "I tell them I ride bikes down North Main and they tell me I'm crazy."

[LisaL]

1. Well dah.