Rural two-lane roads are where the worst passes happen.
Crash data and field studies say the same thing. The infrastructure conversation is mostly urban; the deaths aren't.
When non-cyclists picture a dangerous road, they usually picture city traffic: dense, fast, crowded. When the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration releases its annual fatality data, the picture that comes out of it is different. For multiple recent years, roughly a third of cyclist fatalities have occurred in rural settings, despite far less cycling happening there. Adjusted for exposure, rural per-mile fatality rates for cyclists are significantly higher than urban ones.
Why rural is worse
- Higher speed differentials. A cyclist riding 15 mph and a truck passing at 55+ mph closes 40 mph of relative speed. The reaction window is small.
- No shoulder, no bike lane. The rider is often in the travel lane by default. Lateral clearance is whatever the driver decides to leave.
- Sight lines + curves. The driver may not see the cyclist until the last moment, and the cyclist has nowhere to bail to.
- Heavy trucks share the road. Tractor-trailers and pickups overtake closer on average than passenger cars in every study that has split the data. The reasons are partly geometry, partly driving culture.
What this means for incident reports
One implication of all this is that rural close-pass incidents are some of the most useful to document carefully. They happen where the road design provides the least margin, and the cases that make it into court (or into a department's civil-citation pile) are the ones where there's a clear record of speed, lateral clearance, and direction of travel.
The PDF Rydiq produces with each incident is built for that conversation. The annotated frame, time-coded clip, lateral clearance estimate with its confidence band, vehicle make / model / color, and (where readable) license plate are all there. You can hand it to an officer on a single page.
Eventually we want to publish a road-class breakdown of aggregate ride data: pass distance distributions for rural two-lane, rural multi-lane, suburban, and urban arterial. The beta cohort will give us the first credible cut at that.