Wheels Are Turning to Make Albuquerque Streets Less Threatening to Bicycle Commuters

On a typical sunny August afternoon in Albuquerque, Annie Frang was riding her bike home from work as she’d done dozens of times before. Then she was lying on the pavement next to a roundabout after being struck by a car.

Multiple injuries required Frang to visit urgent care, and a separated shoulder still makes it painful for her to sleep on her side. While most of the bruises have faded, the incident left a permanent mark on her sense of safety, and she now rides somewhat timidly. 

“The thing is, it’s a bicyclist against a car,” she said, “so I feel like I have the burden of being overly, overly cautious.” 

Frang’s wariness points to a challenge facing an oft-cited climate solution. As the West grapples with rising temperatures, increasing bicycle commuting is a common suggestion for everyday people to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and slow climate change. However, Mountain West cities from Albuquerque to Las Vegas are struggling to make their streets safe for riders.

“15 Too Many”

Frang’s experience is all too common in Albuquerque, which is frequently included on national “most dangerous cities” lists for pedestrians and cyclists. In 2023, 125 bike riders in this high desert town of about a half million residents were involved in collisions with vehicles. Three died.

Though the statistics fluctuate from year to year, 15 people suffered life-ending injuries while bicycling in Albuquerque over the past five years, according to Valerie Hermanson, public works strategic program manager for the city. 

“That’s 15 too many people in my opinion,” she said.

That’s led the city to try to make its streets safer for bicycles. In May 2019, Mayor Tim Keller signed the Vision Zero pledge with a goal of eliminating all traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2040. Vision Zero is a multi-nation road traffic safety project that emerged from Sweden in the late 1990s. Today, more than 50 cities across the United States, including Mountain West towns like Tempe, Ariz., Boulder, Colo., Denver and Albuquerque, are part of the Vision Zero Network, a nonprofit that helps communities reach their goals in the program.

Albuquerque’s Vision Zero efforts put a particular emphasis on protecting what Hermanson calls more vulnerable roadway users: cyclists and pedestrians.

“I think over the last five years, the city’s really taken infrastructure for people walking and biking very seriously and has really put investments into really incredible projects,” she said. 

For instance, in 2024 the city added a buffered bike lane, an extra space on the pavement that separates the biking lane from the car lane, along about a half mile of Louisiana Boulevard in the southeast part of the city. As Albuquerque’s first separated cycling infrastructure, the new lane also features protective elements including posts made of PVC pipe and sturdy ground barriers measuring a few inches tall every 15 feet or so. Situated in the heart of the International District, an area with some of the highest poverty rates in the state, the project brought cycling infrastructure to one of the city’s most underserved communities, according to Hermanson. Historically, the Louisiana corridor has been one of the most dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists.

Another example is the West Central Complete Streets Project, which wrapped up phase one in April 2024. Located on the far western edge of town, the scheme added a paved multi-use trail adjacent to Central Avenue as well as buffered bike lanes on a 3/4-mile strip of road that has been particularly dangerous and features three separate roadside memorials known locally as “descansos,” which traditionally mark deaths along the roadway. The project’s next phase will include similar renovations over about another half mile of Central as well as a possible protected intersection—a setup that keeps bicycles physically separate from motor vehicles until they enter the junction—on 98th Street, a major crossing point with the road.

Meanwhile, the city is in the midst of planning the Albuquerque Rail Trail, a 7-mile urban multi-use path that will link downtown to nearby neighborhoods, cultural destinations, mass transit options and the Rail Yards, which includes over a dozen surviving buildings from the now-defunct Santa Fe Railway that are currently used to host a weekly farmer’s market. City officials broke ground in May 2024, and the project is expected to take at least a decade to complete.

“There’s a lot of other good examples over the last few years of where we’ve really invested in improving our bicycling infrastructure,” Hermanson says. “We are looking to do some of those innovative best practices that we’re seeing other cities in the United States as well as in Europe do.” 

These initiatives appear to be making something of a difference. In 2018, Albuquerque cyclists were involved in 193 crashes with motor vehicles, according to the University of New Mexico‘s Geospatial and Population Studies Pedalcyclist Traffic Crash Dashboard. Since then, numbers have tapered off a bit, ranging from 107 to 125 annually from 2021 through 2023. The city was even named as a Silver Award recipient by The League of American Bicyclists in 2020, partially due to what this nonprofit advocacy group calls “very good” bicycle laws and ordinances.

“Paint Is Not Protection”

But not so fast, some local cyclists say. 

“I think the city deserves some kudos on the progress they’ve made so far, and they have adopted Complete Streets and Vision Zero goals and all of that,” said Eric Biedermann, board member at large for BikeABQ, a non-profit cyclist advocacy group. “They’re aiming in the right direction, but I think there’s still a long way to go.”

He points, for example, to the high variability in infrastructure across town in terms of cyclist exposure to vehicles.

“There are a lot of areas where, in various ways, cyclists are put in the mix with drivers of cars,” Biedermann said. “Sometimes there’s bike lanes and there’s varying levels of quality in those bike lanes. And then often cyclists are forced to be just out in the same lane [with motor vehicles].”

That’s bad news in a city whose drivers were recently rated by Allstate as the riskiest in the nation’s 100 most populous cities.

In fact, The League of American Bicyclists, a national nonprofit that aims to “create a bicycle-friendly America for everyone,” recommended that the city work with local league cycling instructors to offer bicycle friendly driver training to motorists.

“Many local bicyclists reported aggressive and distracted driving behavior as a significant barrier to bicycling safely and comfortably in Albuquerque,” the organization stated in its 2020 analysis of the city.

And, the new protected lanes in the lower-income International District are an anomaly, Biedermann said. 

“It does seem like the city has more bike infrastructure in areas that are more well off,” he said. ”So it really is a tale of two cities.”

Hermanson says projects like those on Louisiana Boulevard and Central Avenue aim to address this gap.

While Biedermann sees a shortage of cycling infrastructure as a “lack of political will” from those in charge, Hermanson contends that it’s a scarcity of funds.

And even when cyclist-friendly elements are put into place, they can be misused by motorists. Standing at the scene of her accident, Frang pointed to skid marks on the roundabout—because of the structure’s softly sloped edges and low height, cars sometimes simply roll over the side of it, reducing its effectiveness.

And that new development on Louisiana Avenue? Biedermann says people have been parking their cars in the bike lane, forcing cyclists back into traffic on the street. 

Plus, while bike lanes—especially buffered ones—help in protecting cyclists, he would like to see more physical barriers around town.

“Paint is not protection,” he said.

The city plans to do just that, using the lessons learned from the Louisiana Boulevard project, Hermanson said.

Wheeled Woes Across the West

Albuquerque is not the only Southwestern city struggling with dangerous conditions for bike riders. Over the years, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Tucson also have earned spots on lists of cities that are dangerous for cyclists. Las Vegas, for example, averages about 490 bicycle accidents a year, according to the People Powered Movement, a national organization that aims to help increase bicycle usage and pedestrian access throughout U.S. cities.

Urban sprawl plagues cities throughout the West, marked by suburbanization and car-centric lifestyles. This has resulted in a lot of arterial roadways meant to move high volumes of motorized traffic as quickly as possible, which can make it hard to retrofit roads with bike lanes, Hermanson explained. 

Still, other cities across the region offer inspiration, she added. For instance, Tucson implemented BikeHAWK signals, an adaptation of previously existing traffic lights with a pair of red lights over a single yellow. Pedestrians and cyclists can activate the signal to tell motor vehicle traffic to stop so they can cross the road safely. According to one study, there have been no cyclist-related crashes at these signals since they were implemented six years ago. 

Tucson also uses PVC bike barriers similar to those seen in Albuquerque’s inaugural project. However, visible damage to these structures, along with some that have gone completely missing, on a road in the southern part of the city shows one challenge that comes with this style of protective infrastructure—it’s no sturdier against a car bumper than a bicycle is. Meanwhile, newly completed bike barriers in one neighborhood on the city’s west side offer a more robust solution: concrete slabs that rise about six inches from the pavement between thick bollards, making it much more difficult for a car to cruise into the cycling lane. The bollards also feature reflective strips, making them more visible at night.

Hermanson also mentioned Denver as a source of inspiration. The city added 137 miles of new bike lanes between 2018 and 2023 with plans to add more. Of those, 45 were buffered bike lanes.

As for Albuquerque, she believes the city will continue to invest in cyclist-friendly infrastructure that supports a diverse community of riders and benefits the environment. In late December, the city made progress towards this goal with the passage of the Bikeways and Trail Facilities Plan, which prioritizes bikeway and paved multi-use trail projects and was unanimously approved by the City Council. Altogether, the plan proposes 385 miles of new or enhanced bikeways, including on-street and paved multi-use trails that are “considered both plausible near term and long term.”

“By creating safe, convenient, and comfortable all ages, abilities, and backgrounds bikeway networks for recreation and essential transportation, we create opportunities to shift more driving trips to bicycling,” Hermanson said. “In addition to improving air quality, more bicycling can improve safety and public health [and] save people money. And of course, it’s fun.”