A cyclist in Louisiana died at fourteen times the rate of one in Maine.
Same country, same federal vehicle standards, same year. The state numbers are the strongest evidence that this is about places, not people.
Louisiana recorded 0.96 cyclist deaths per 100,000 people in 2024. Maine recorded 0.07. The national rate was 0.32.
Both states were subject to the same federal vehicle safety standards, the same national fleet, and the same year of weather and fuel prices. The gap between them is roughly fourteenfold.
The raw counts and the rates disagree
By count, the worst states are the big ones. Florida recorded 208 cyclist deaths, more than any other state. California followed with 163, then Texas with 79. Those three alone were about 41 percent of the national total.
Adjusted for population the picture shifts. Louisiana's 0.96 leads, with Florida close behind at 0.89. California, for all its raw numbers, sits at 0.41 — above the national average but nowhere near the top. Texas comes in at 0.25, below the national rate.
There is a third way to cut it that is different again: cyclist deaths as a share of all road deaths in the state. On that measure Rhode Island leads at 9.6 percent against a national 2.8 percent, and Maine is last at 0.6 percent. That measure is not really about danger to cyclists — a state where few people die in cars for any reason will show a higher cyclist share — but it is the one most likely to be quoted out of context.
What none of these control for
Exposure, again. Nobody knows how many miles were ridden in Louisiana or Maine, so nobody can say whether Louisiana is more dangerous per mile or simply has more people riding in worse conditions. A state can post a low rate because it is safe or because almost nobody rides, and the published data cannot tell those apart.
This is the same missing denominator that runs through the whole report, and it is worth naming every time rather than quietly hoping nobody asks.
What survives the caveats
Even granting all of that, the spread is too large to be explained by measurement problems alone. Fourteen to one is not a rounding artefact. Something about road design, speed, climate, trip distance and land use is producing very different outcomes for people doing the same activity in the same country.
The useful consequence is that this is a solvable class of problem. National statistics invite fatalism because they move slowly and the causes look diffuse. State-level variation of this size says the causes are local, which means the fixes are too.
It also says something about where measurement would pay off most. The states at the top of that table are not short of attention from advocates. They are short of the road-level detail that would let anyone say which corridors are producing the outcome, which is a question a lot of instrumented rides can answer and a state fatality count structurally cannot.
Source: NHTSA, Traffic Safety Facts: Bicyclists and Other Cyclists, 2024 Data (DOT HS 813 822, July 2026), Table 6.