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Imagine your drive home from work.
Air conditioning blasting, music blaring, seven minutes left on your commute.
Traffic is moving along, but there’s a huge gap ahead.
Then you see why: a cyclist in one of the lanes, inching along past the 45mph sign. You take a breath, annoyed at the time eaten up by this one guy.
Up ahead, cars skid to a stop as a teenager wearing a backpack scampers across the road.
That was close.
Then you give in to that sticky, judgmental thought you’ve been pushing away.
Why can’t people just follow the rules?
But in your rearview mirror, you catch a glimpse of the biker weaving into a neighborhood, balancing bagged groceries on each handlebar.
And you can’t remember the last place you saw a crosswalk.
Safe and comfortable in your 65-degree car, shame begins to creep in.
More nonmotorists like bikers and pedestrians are dying each year, according to data released this month by the National Center for Health Statistics. Between 2013 and 2023, pedestrian and cyclist deaths in the U.S. rose from 2.1 deaths per 100,000 people to 2.9. The South is among the most deadly regions for nonmotorists, with 3.5 deaths per 100,000 people in 2023. That’s compared to the Midwest and Northeast’s 2.0 and 1.9, respectively.
The South also tends to have more rural communities with less infrastructure for nonmotorists. But even in urban metros like Greensboro, with its hilly topography and winding roads, it can be hard to see everything and hit the brakes in time.
The City of Greensboro’s Department of Transportation is now working with what they’ve got, and making big changes across the board. Its goal is to make the city car-optional, GDOT’s Transportation Planning Division Manager Tyler Meyer told The Thread.
That means giving residents the ability to move freely throughout the city without an undue amount of inconvenience, Meyer said.
“Obviously, Greensboro is car-optional today,” Meyer said. “It just might take you a lot longer to get where you’re going.”
Shifting Gears
The city wasn’t always this open-minded. When Meyer first started at GDOT in 1999, he was told, “‘We don’t do bike lanes.’”
That had consequences.
“I got hit six times between 2004 and 2010,” said Nicole Lindahl, a member of the advocacy group Bicycling In Greensboro (BIG). “The infrastructure wasn’t here, and drivers were not used to cyclists being on the road.”
People were really afraid to bike in Greensboro back then, she said.
“The more people that are on our streets on bikes or walking, the more comfortable drivers become with our behaviour and interactions with them,” she said. “So the safer conditions become in that regard.”
The city’s mentality has changed a lot since he started, Meyer said, to keep up with national trends and increase safety. Over the last 20 years, the city has built 113 miles of sidewalks and greenways, touching all five districts.
The city is reexamining roads that were built wider than needed or with surplus lanes. It is working to “narrow those up” and install bike lanes, Meyer said. It made those changes on parts of Josephine Boyd Street and others.
It’s had positive effects, Meyer said.
“If we have four lanes approaching an intersection, that’s encouraging people to pass in an unsafe way,” he said. “If you narrow it down just to one lane with the bike lane, it reduces that behavior. It’s an example of how reallocating street space can not just improve conditions for cyclists, but also reduce motorist conflicts.”
The messaging around nonmotorists’ place on the road could also be clearer, residents like Chad Eby told The Thread.
Under state law, bicycles are considered vehicles and allowed to ride on most roads. Eby spends part of the year in Columbus, Ohio, where bike lanes are painted a bright green. The same can be seen in Madison, Wisconsin, and other Midwest cities. There’s clear messaging dictating safe places to cycle, Eby said.
“It’s really obvious that you’re not supposed to drive in [bike lanes] at all,” Eby said. “You’re not supposed to park in them, and you’re not supposed to put trash cans in them.”
“I think part of the problem is that people—whether they’re pedestrians, cyclists, or motorists—just generally don’t know what the laws are,”
Chad Eby, Greensboro resident
“I don’t feel like that type of messaging has really happened here,” he said. “At least not in such a way that it’s really reaching enough people.”
“That worries me,” he said. “Because once every two months, I have a driver yell at me and tell me to get off the road—when I’m on a dedicated bike route that’s marked with signage.”
Whether it’s cyclists riding the wrong way down one-way streets or pedestrians walking in bike lanes, Eby said, he sees a lot of people breaking the rules.
“I think part of the problem is that people—whether they’re pedestrians, cyclists, or motorists—just generally don’t know what the laws are,” Eby said.
But cars can do much more damage than cyclists.
New bus routes and increasing bus frequency also help everyone get where they’re going safely, said Yuan Zhou, a transportation planning engineer for the city. Creating bike lanes and sidewalks that link up with bus routes helps further connect those dots.
“It’s all together,” she said.
Danger Zones
More than 2,000 pedestrians have been hit in Greensboro since 2007, according to nonmotorist crash data from the North Carolina Department of Transportation—131 of them were killed.
Over the same period, 679 cyclists have been hit on Greensboro streets. Six of them didn’t survive.
Last year alone, 32 cyclists were hit by cars. Pedestrian numbers were even higher—126 pedestrians hit, 18 killed. That was up sharply from 92 pedestrian accidents the previous year.
In Greensboro, people are more likely to be hurt in crashes in general. The city ranked third in the state for crashes resulting in injuries in 2023, according to the NC Department of Transportation’s most recent traffic crash fact report released last year.
When a pedestrian is hit by a car, it can be difficult to determine the actual circumstances from official reports.
Common phrases like “pedestrian failed to yield,” “crossing an expressway,” or “standing in roadway” fail to get at why the pedestrian had to use the road in the first place.
Often people just don’t realize how fast cars are coming at them, Meyer said. Or maybe there wasn’t a crosswalk.
“If a car is coming at 80 miles per hour, you just don’t have time to get out of the way,” he said.
Many sites across town have remained common crash sites for years. The intersection of East Bessemer and Park avenues, East Wendover Avenue and North English Street, and South Eugene Street and West Gate City Boulevard are frequent problem areas. Multiple accidents involving cyclists have occurred on East McGee and South Davie streets.
“It depends on where you’re biking,” said Brian Leonard, chair of BIG. “Certainly some parts of the city are way better for biking than others.”
Downtown has nice greenways and sidewalks people can use, cyclists told The Thread—if they can afford to live there. But places to bike and walk, especially safely, are more sparse in other parts of the city.
The tangled web at the intersection of Lawndale Drive, Cornwallis Drive, Green Valley Road, and Battleground Ave. is particularly harrowing, cyclists said.
“Greensboro is vivisected by these large roads with no real thought to how anyone but someone in a car would cross them,” said cyclist Ted Podlesni. “They’re kind of designed to be the aortas of the city, pumping people in and out.”
Podlesni has been hit twice in Greensboro while riding his bicycle. The first time, he was going to the dentist when a car crashed into him while crossing Gate City Boulevard. It made the news. The second time, he was crossing Benbow Road and was hit by a car turning right on red. Luckily, he jumped off his bike just before the car struck and dragged it about 10 feet, reducing it to mangled metal.
Those types of intersections have many moving parts and can be dangerous.
“That’s a serious thing for cyclists and pedestrians because when you’re turning right on red, your attention is really divided three ways,” Podlesni said.
After Podlesni’s first accident, his mother begged him to stop biking. But it isn’t just a way of getting around for him. His grandparents and father all died of heart attacks.
“Mom,” he told her. “It’s this or it’s heart disease.”
Helping Those in Need
Lots of people bike as a hobby, and some spend several thousand dollars to do so. Some, like Podlesni, do it for their health, the environment, and because it’s more affordable. For others, it’s just a way to feel more comfortable, blow off some steam, and ease anxiety.
“A lot of people do it for pleasure,” Podlesni said, “Most of the time I feel a little constricted in a car. I really do enjoy the freedom.”
When Eby first moved to the area 19 years ago, he asked his new neighbor why there weren’t many options for biking around the city.
“Well, somebody has to pay for that,” Eby recalled them saying.
Much has changed since then. But Eby said he’d be willing to pay more in taxes if it went toward benefitting the city’s biking and walking infrastructure.
Some ride bikes because it’s all they can afford. The price of owning a car averages a little over $12,000 annually between insurance, gas, and maintenance costs, according to the American Automobile Association.
“For so many folks in Greensboro and all over the nation, it’s really expensive to maintain a car,” said Lindahl. “It’s really expensive to ride a bus. I mean, seriously, like even the discounted rides, they add up. They are not accessible to a lot of folks.”
On Wednesday mornings at 5:30 a.m., Glenn Trent and Tony Campbell serve coffee, sandwiches, and snacks to workers lining up at Staff Zone, a temporary labor agency. But a lot of the workers don’t have reliable means to get there. Sometimes the weather cancels their jobs after they’ve already walked miles to Staff Zone, Trent said. That’s where he offers the workers an extra hand—he’ll fix up donated bikes and give them to those in need.
One of Trent’s friends, Sheldon Herman, set up a shop in an old city building in Barber Park, fixing up donated bikes to give away. Sometimes people snag the broken-down ones from the pile. If they’d just ask, Herman said, he could give them the fixed bikes for free.
Inside, rows upon rows of wheels line the walls. A long to-do list lives on the door. Worn tools are scattered across the room, donated boxes of cookies line the table at the entrance. During the bike shop’s ride on Sundays, children with boundless sugar-fueled energy pedal furiously around the park. Herman calls them the “cookie monsters.”
Outside, volunteers breathe new life into the bikes. The roof covering their workspace has been eaten by rust, big peeling pieces hanging from the ceiling. Herman hopes the shop will move someday, ideally to the greenway, where it won’t be hidden away.
Herman also helped start Changing Gears, a partnership between Biking in Greensboro and the Interactive Resource Center. The program relies on donated bikes that they refurbish and distribute to the center’s unhoused clients.
“Bicycling in Greensboro feels like that’s something that we can actually help folks with,” Lindahl said. “We can make that accessible to people, and bicycles open doors.”
The Most Important Safety Feature
Meyer has noticed changes in driving behavior patterns since the pandemic. While crashes fell in the U.S. and other countries because fewer people were on the road, he says our ability to relate to each other has changed.
“People were becoming a little less respectful of other people, just in general, but including on the road,” Meyer said, “It really helps to put other people first when you’re driving and not just think about where you’re going or how busy you are or how inconvenient it is to slow down for just a second.”
Technology is another problem. North Carolina law bans texting while driving, but not calling. Drivers were on their phones when Lindahl was hit and seriously injured while riding her bicycle.
“We’re advancing as a society so quickly that I don’t think we can handle it,” she said. “We haven’t taken the steps that we need to handle that yet.”
In the cycling community, some admit they need to be mindful on the road, too.
“If we demand respect, we’ve got to give respect,” said Woodie Anderson, manager of the bike shop Cycles de ORO.
“You are the most important safety feature in your vehicle,” Meyer said, pointing to an orange poster hanging on one of the cubicles in the GDOT offices.
The city can try to influence people’s behavior, but they have to be receptive to change.
“Can people amongst themselves start to think a little differently?” Meyer said. “Every little bit makes a difference.”
For cyclists like Podlesni, the small moments make a difference—when someone in a car stops for him and waves. That’s when he feels the change, however incremental.
“I’ve seen people smile when I ring the bike bell,” he said. “How can you not smile when you hear the bike bell?”
Gale is a Report for America Corps member. Before joining The Assembly, she spent two years covering local government and community issues in Greensboro and Winston-Salem for Triad City Beat. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from North Carolina State University.
More by this author.