Seven big American cities killed no cyclists at all last year.

Buried near the end of NHTSA's 2024 cyclist report, after the tables of deaths by age and state, is a single sentence worth more than most of what precedes it. Seven American cities with populations over 500,000 reported zero cyclist fatalities in 2024: Dallas, Fort Worth, Seattle, Denver, El Paso, Memphis and Milwaukee.

Zero is a number that safety data almost never produces. It is worth sitting with before explaining it away.

The honest caveats, first

A single year of zero in one city is a small sample. These are counts, not rates, and a city that recorded zero in 2024 may have recorded three in 2023 and will not necessarily record zero again. Nothing in a one-year figure establishes that a city has solved anything.

Nor does zero mean nobody was hurt. The same report counts 52,887 cyclists injured nationally, and injuries are not broken out by city. A city can have a terrible year for people being hospitalised and still appear on that list.

And the cities differ enormously in how much cycling happens in them. Seattle and Denver have meaningful cycling populations. Others on the list have very little, and a city where almost nobody rides will produce few cyclist deaths for reasons that are not an achievement.

Why it still matters

Because the alternative framing — that some baseline number of dead cyclists is the unavoidable cost of having roads — is demonstrably false in at least seven places for at least one year. Whatever combination of infrastructure, speed, land use and luck produced those zeros, the outcome is achievable.

The contrast within the same table is stark. Tucson recorded the highest big-city rate at 1.44 cyclist deaths per 100,000 people, followed by Sacramento at 1.12. Nashville and Washington, D.C. came in at 0.14, with Chicago, Boston and Detroit at 0.15. That is a tenfold spread between American cities in the same year under the same federal law.

A tenfold spread is not explained by cyclists in Tucson being careless. It is a property of places.

The number nobody has

Here is what the report cannot tell you, and what would make that spread actionable: which roads. Cyclist deaths in all 38 major cities combined accounted for about 13 percent of the national total, which means the overwhelming majority happened somewhere else — spread thinly across suburbs, small towns and rural highways, at a density too low for any single jurisdiction to see a pattern in.

At that density, fatality counts will never identify a dangerous road. A corridor might kill someone once a decade and frighten riders off it every single day, and only the first of those appears in any dataset a road authority holds.

That gap is the entire argument for measuring passes instead of waiting for crashes. Not because close passes predict deaths in some fixed ratio — they do not, and we have said so elsewhere — but because they are dense enough to say something about a specific road, which is the level at which anything actually gets fixed.

Source: NHTSA, Traffic Safety Facts: Bicyclists and Other Cyclists, 2024 Data (DOT HS 813 822, July 2026).