Safe by Design: Examining the Impact of Trails and Bike-Ped Infrastructure on Safety in America
Up until local volunteers cleared rail ties and debris along a 17-mile rural northwestern Nebraska stretch of what is now part of the 317-mile Cowboy Recreation and Nature Trail, you had to bike highways if you wanted to put in miles around Gordon.
For years, Kris Ferguson dealt with this drawback of living in rural Nebraska by riding the roads with caution—bright clothes, a helmet, no earbuds. “During combine season I was very careful, but I tried to be cautious all the time,” she said. With a population of around 1,600 and agricultural surroundings in all directions, Gordon isn’t heavily trafficked. Ferguson said she rarely felt uncomfortable until 2011, when an inattentive driver sideswiped her, sending her into a ditch off state Highway 27, a north–south highway that intersects with U.S. Highway 20 through Gordon.
Ferguson, though badly injured, survived her crash. That same year, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data, nearly 700 cyclists did not. Since then, the number of cycling fatalities has steadily risen. Nearly 1,000 died in 2021. Pedestrian deaths (4,457 in 2011; 7,314 in 2024) have experienced a similar climb, although 2024 represents a slight decrease from 2023’s high of 7,593.
“The rates of danger for people outside of cars, especially people walking and biking, have gotten greater, and we’ve not kept pace in America with our street design and our physical environment to really make up for that,” said Leah Shahum, executive director of the Vision Zero Network, a nonprofit initiative to eliminate traffic related deaths. “I think we are understanding we need to quicken our pace.”
In a December 2025 Washington Post article, traffic experts and advocates affirmed that even though programs like Vision Zero have been established to increase bike and pedestrian safety, and have been federally endorsed in the past, there has been a consistent lack of local legislative support and funding by the federal government to make the programs effective.
“It has not been implemented with the resources and commitment and courage from legislators that is required,” the Post quoted Families for Safe Streets founder Amy Cohen, whose son was killed by a speeding vehicle in front of their home in New York City.
This article was originally published in the Spring/Summer 2026 issue of Rails to Trails magazine and has been reposted here in an edited format. Subscribe to read more articles about remarkable trails while also supporting our work.
Infrastructure Is Key to Improving Safety
A 2019 study by the National Transportation Safety Board, “Bicyclist Safety on U.S. Roadways: Crash Risks and Countermeasures,” produced a set of recommendations tied to three major safety issues. No. 1 was improving roadway infrastructure—think separated bike lanes and safer intersections—followed by improving cyclist visibility and helmet usage.
Cities where investments have been made in protective infrastructure have seen results. Across 10 U.S. cities (including Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, Seattle, Chicago and Portland, Oregon) researchers in 2016 found that growth across bikeway networks led to increased usage and decreased rates of crashes, fatalities and severe injuries. “All 10 of these cities increasingly have been building cycle tracks, buffered bike lanes and off-road greenways, which provide physical separation from motor vehicles and thus greater safety,” the authors wrote in the article published in the American Journal of Public Health.
Trails factor heavily into protecting all users, said Scott Goldstein, senior director of government relations for Rails to Trails Conservancy and former deputy assistant secretary for transportation policy at the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT).
“You have to have the infrastructure, and it needs to be connected,” he said. “Trails are such a big part of that, and they integrate so well with on-road bike lanes and separated facilities on roads.”
Additionally, similar to how on-road walking and biking infrastructure builds connectivity in denser areas where trails may not be feasible, trails create safe connectivity on expanses where on road connectivity is unrealistic—such as places only connected by highways.
Trail Development ‘Saved My Riding’
When the car that struck Ferguson sent her crashing into a ditch, she broke her leg and arm, bruised her lung and hurt her hip. The experience also left her traumatized. She feared riding roads and once experienced a panic attack during an organized event on a highway near Scottsbluff.
“We really had no safe place to be active, whether you wanted to walk or bike,” Ferguson said. “Everywhere you wanted to be active in our community, and in a lot of the little communities in western Nebraska, you’re on the road. And I thought that was unacceptable.”
Having a safe place to ride fueled Ferguson’s drive to rally local support to start a nonprofit and fund and develop the disused section of rail line running from Gordon to Rushville into a 17-mile-long Cowboy Trail segment, which runs alongside U.S. 20 and officially opened in 2019. The trail’s development was transformative for Ferguson. “The Cowboy Trail,” she said, “really saved my riding.”
“As you build out that [bicycling] network more and more and more, then each piece you add to that puzzle will have bigger and bigger and bigger impacts.”
— Nick Ferenchak, Center Director, USDOT Center for Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety
‘If You Build It, They Will Come’
Research has shown that, when more people decide to bike in a space, the rate of crashes does not increase at the same pace as the population. It’s called the “safety in numbers” principle, and a 2019 meta-study affirmed the concept, while adding that more research was needed to determine any relationship between quality of infrastructure and ridership habits.
Nick Ferenchak, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Mexico, has been looking into that recently, including in a study of traffic counters and satellite data across 28 U.S. cities for his Ph.D. project on bicycle commuter patterns, which revealed a pedestrian-cyclist migration pattern—that people gravitate, he said, toward spaces that are designed to be safer.
Ferenchak heads the USDOT’s Center for Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety, a consortium of researchers at five universities whose work is conducted with the goal of eliminating pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities and serious injuries. In 2024, Ferenchak and University of Colorado Denver researcher Wesley Marshall published a study adding to a body of research showing that midsize cities with larger cycling populations are safer for all road users. Bike-friendly communities like Boulder, Colorado; Corvallis, Oregon; and Davis, California, all had traffic fatality rates substantially lower than the U.S. average—and lower, the researchers found, than similar-size cities with lower bicycling rates. In total, they compared seven high-bike-rate communities to seven low-bike-rate communities and found that there were 61.4% more traffic fatalities and 40% more pedestrian fatalities over a 10-year span in the low-bike rate communities.
Ferenchak’s latest paper, published in 2026, builds on previous work linking increases in bicycle commuting with the development of lower-stress installations, like protected bike lanes. He and Marshall looked at 14 couplets of cities across the United States of similar populations and styles (e.g., college towns) but contrasting bike commuter levels, comparing five years of before/after data on usage in spaces where safety elements—protected bike lanes, shared-lane markings and, less frequently, off-road trails—were installed.
Across all of them, they found that adding protected bike lanes was effective at increasing ridership. But when you install a safer passageway in a city with an established biking/pedestrian network surrounding it, “you’re really going to see some pretty, pretty strong impacts,” Ferenchak said.
Or, in Field of Dreams-speak: “If you build it, they will come,” Ferenchak said. “Protect it, and even more will come.”
He added, “You can see in our paper that, yes, you might have modest increases in ridership as you begin to build out your network, but as you build out that network more and more and more, then each piece you add to that puzzle will have bigger and bigger and bigger impacts.”
Tell the Story
Scott Goldstein said research like Ferenchak’s “suggests that we need to double down on what’s working, and that’s why we’re pushing back so hard against efforts to cut funding in the next transportation law.”
Current surface transportation law, as authorized by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, expires at the end of September, and Goldstein said RTC’s goal is to ensure that the case for walking and biking infrastructure is heard. RTC is advocating for Congress not only to reauthorize but also to strengthen some of the country’s major trail funding programs, including Transportation Alternatives, amid increasing safety concerns—with 20 pedestrians being killed every day in America, and people walking and biking accounting for “a significant proportion of the 40,000 people being killed on roadways each year.”
Both Goldstein and Shahum affirm the importance of data; as more safety infrastructure comes online across the United States, it’s important to collect data to tell the story of what’s working. Shahum said collecting before/after safety data, as well as data showing minimal changes to drive times, has helped city planners emphasize that safety should be a top priority, and that it’s not at the expense of motorists’ commute times.
Shahum recently published an article in Streetsblog USA about Vision Zero initiatives across the country that have resulted in reduced fatalities and injuries, including in Columbus, Ohio, where converting a six-lane street into a two-lane street with protected bike lanes reduced crashes by 50%, and in Philadelphia, where separated bike lanes, road diets and other traffic calming measures led to a 34% reduction in serious and fatal crashes.
“It’s just so overwhelmingly clear that when you build [separated bike and pedestrian] infrastructure, it improves the experience but, most importantly, the safety of the people using that infrastructure,” Goldstein said.
Bike-Ped Investments in the Capital See Big Returns
In 2014, a pedestrian bridge built over the Rhode Island Avenue Metro station in Washington, D.C.’s Edgewood neighborhood not only forged a connection along the city’s 7.9-mile Metropolitan Branch Trail, but also offered pedestrians a safer way to access the station than many were using. Before the bridge, hundreds of people were avoiding a circuitous ramp-filled route to the station by crossing railroad tracks.
It’s one example of an effort to grow the city’s separated walking and biking infrastructure between 2000 and 2015. During that period, D.C. saw a 46% decrease in bike crashes per 100,000 trips and a 50% decrease in fatalities and serious injuries over that same period, while ridership grew by 384%.
“It’s about taking a systems approach,” said Gabe Klein, an urban planner who held director and commissioner roles, respectively, for the D.C. and Chicago transportation departments before becoming executive director of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation during the Biden administration. “It’s about understanding the differences in context, and it’s about having a really rich toolbox to pull from that is built around these simple understandings.”
In D.C., he sought to develop a safe network of protected bike lanes, with the first segment, the 15th Street Cycle Track, opening in 2009. It took over a lane of what Klein described as a four-lane, one-way “speedway” out of D.C. Klein recalled some community members, already concerned about drivers blasting out of town, were skeptical that a bike lane and a road diet would be the answer.
“We said, ‘Hey, we’re going to do this together with you,’” Klein recalled. “We’re going to collect all the data, we’re going to show it to you, and if there’s things you like or don’t like, you can tell us.”
Early data showed vehicles’ median speeds slowed by nearly 7 miles an hour, while 40% more cyclists took to 15th Street.
Now the cycle track runs north–south, and in 2021, it expanded to cover a new segment, from Pennsylvania Avenue NW to Maine Avenue SW, part of the District Department of Transportation’s (DDOT’s) citywide plan to install 20 miles of protected bike lanes by 2022 as well as a long-standing National Park Service (NPS) effort to improve bikeability for the National Mall. It is this federally owned segment that found itself in the crosshairs this year—serving as a litmus test for attacks on on-road bicycling and walking infrastructure.
Challenge Over D.C. Bike Lane
In late January and early February 2026, according to Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA) Advocacy Director Kalli Krumpos, rumors started swirling that the NPS would tear out the federally owned 0.75-mile stretch of bike lane. There was no public meeting and no written proposal for the action, which federal officials then confirmed in March.
Compare that, Krumpos said, with years of studies, planning and funding that went into the NPS decision to partner with DDOT to, as the NPS website states, “close a gap in the District’s bicycle network and allow users to travel between the center of Washington, D.C., to the Crystal City/National Airport area of Arlington, Virginia, entirely via trails and protected bicycle facilities.”
Tearing out the bike lane, Krumpos said, would create a missing link in the D.C. area’s vast, developing low‑stress network and “one of the best ways to get to Northern Virginia through D.C.” The cycle track feeds into hundreds of miles of connected trails across the region’s Capital Trails Network.
Along with its role as a connector, DDOT data shows the cycle track is improving safety for cyclists and motorists. Before/after (per 100 days rate) data released in March shows that the project reduced all roadway crashes by 46% and bike injury crashes by 91%, while also increasing bicycle traffic by 3% and housing three of the city’s busiest Capital Bikeshare stations. Peak hour travel time for motorists, meanwhile, decreased by 36 seconds northbound and 40 seconds southbound.
“Bike lanes organize the right-of-way in larger, busier thoroughfares,” said Krumpos. “Removing the bike lane would be irresponsible to drivers as well as cyclists and pedestrians.”
In a statement to The Washington Post, a spokesperson for the Federal Highway Administration, which would implement the removal, said the goal was to “restore common sense into city planning.” An NPS statement also sent to the Post cited the need for the removal, “ensuring safe access for residents, commuters, visitors and emergency services.”
D.C.’s mayor, citing safety data, objected to the decision, while 11 members of Congress signed a letter to the NPS director demanding the decision be reversed. WABA filed a lawsuit seeking to halt the process, saying in part that federal agencies had not followed the legally required public process and, in not doing so, were risking the lives of people who use the bike lane.
In late April, a federal judge agreed, putting the 15th Street teardown project on pause. Judge Amy Jackson called the removal “arbitrary and capricious” and said the project could not proceed as planned, as the Trump administration had not followed due process. WABA and bicycling advocates celebrated at the Washington Monument, which the protected lane passes.
While the government could appeal the ruling, it will have to follow a public input process and conduct further research, noted Elizabeth Kiker, WABA’s executive director, in an April 2026 blog post.
“We matter. Our safety matters,” she wrote. “We are fired up and ready to keep fighting. But in the meantime, go take a ride down 15th Street and enjoy this lovely spring day.”
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