It is significant to have safer roads for cyclists and motorists. Every May, two national observances overlap: National Bicycle Safety Month and Motorcycle Safety Awareness Month. Both draw attention to a problem that tends to receive less coverage than it deserves. These are the physical conditions of the roads that two-wheeled travelers depend on, as well as the negative consequences of ignoring the deterioration of these conditions.
Faded bike lane striping, worn crosswalk markings, and unaddressed potholes are potentially significant hazards for any riders who lack the protection of an enclosed vehicle. Fortunately, new technologies have begun to allow transportation agencies to detect and address these conditions before they begin to cause serious harm. Safer roads for cyclists and motorists are a must.
What the Crash Data Shows
The numbers from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are hard to set aside. In 2023, 1,166 cyclists, more than 6,300 motorcyclists, and 7,314 pedestrians were killed in U.S. traffic crashes. Bicyclist deaths rose 4 percent over 2022. Over the decade from 2014 to 2023, fatalities among cyclists, pedestrians, and other nonmotorists grew by more than 50 percent. That’s well above the overall increase in traffic deaths during the same period. So, safer roads for cyclists and motorists are essential.
Bicyclists and motorcyclists share a common vulnerability: they are exposed to road surface conditions in ways that the drivers and occupants of enclosed vehicles are not. NHTSA’s own research acknowledges that bicyclists are especially susceptible to road surface conditions and outdoor elements.
A pothole that rattles a car can send a bicycle or motorcycle spinning out of control. A crosswalk worn out enough to become nearly invisible removes the visual cue that signals to drivers where to slow and yield. Similarly, a bike lane that fades and disappears before an intersection leaves cyclists without crucial guidance when they need it most.
How Degraded Infrastructure Creates Specific Risks
Today, it’s so difficult to have safer roads for cyclists and motorists. Road markings and signage are never permanent. Over time, even high-quality paint erodes under UV exposure, tire abrasion, and freeze-thaw cycling. Meanwhile, signs lose their retroreflectivity over time and can become obscured by growing vegetation.
Unfortunately, a peer-reviewed analysis published in the journal Encyclopedia found that road sign and marking maintenance has a direct impact on road safety, and that consistent upkeep is difficult for many agencies to sustain at scale. For cyclists and motorcyclists, these maintenance gaps produce predictable hazards:
- Faded lane markings can blur the boundary between a bike lane and a travel lane
- Degraded pavement near curb cuts and gutter seams can catch narrow tires
- Road signs that are difficult to see quickly can cause unaware travelers to crash more frequently
Why Traditional Inspection Cycles Fall Short
Most transportation agencies rely on scheduled surveys to document road conditions. Inspectors drive or walk a route, log findings, and feed them into a work queue. In many jurisdictions, these surveys occur every two to four years; unfortunately, this cadence cannot keep pace with how quickly pavement markings degrade or surface defects develop.
Deploying specialized inspection vehicles with LiDAR or high-resolution imaging across an entire network is a faster alternative, but financially out of reach for most agencies. As a result, maintenance tends to be reactive. Hazards like a faded crosswalk become worse until a complaint is filed or a crash occurs. This can be months after it has become functionally invisible to drivers.
Passive Data Collection and AI Detection
Recent technology has begun to provide an alternative to what’s possible. Transit buses, maintenance fleets, and delivery vehicles can all combine to generate continuous visual data across the routes they travel. That footage is processed by computer vision models that are trained to detect surface defects, faded markings, and damaged signs. They produce near-continuous awareness of conditions across a road network that surveys cannot duplicate.
This is already happening in practice:
- San Jose, California, mounted detection cameras on street sweepers and parking enforcement vehicles, and reported early success identifying potholes and road debris across the city
- Hawaii’s Department of Transportation launched a dashcam-based monitoring program to analyze guardrails, faded lane lines, and street debris daily
Research funded through the U.S. Department of Transportation’s University Transportation Centers program found that deep learning models applied to dashcam and vehicle camera footage can detect and categorize pavement distress with high accuracy. Just as significantly, the same research found that the approach works with standard cameras rather than specialized equipment.
Earlier Detection, Better Outcomes for Vulnerable Road Users
Is it difficult to have safer roads for cyclists and motorists? For agencies managing infrastructure that sees frequent use by cyclists and motorcyclists, the value of faster detection is undeniable. When a crosswalk degrades, an AI-powered system drawing from passive fleet footage can flag it within days of the problem becoming visually apparent, rather than waiting for the next scheduled survey. At its best, that flag feeds into a prioritized work queue before the condition creates a safety risk.
The same applies to bike lane striping that has worn past the point of reliable visibility at night or in wet conditions, as well as pavement defects that could destabilize a narrow-tired vehicle. Crucially, identifying and geolocating those conditions early changes the economics of roadway maintenance: Small repairs made proactively cost a fraction of what emergency repairs or liability settlements cost after the fact.
A Different Maintenance Model
Shifting from periodic surveys to continuous monitoring changes what transportation agencies can realistically accomplish. Maintenance decisions become driven by reliable quantitative data rather than isolated or anecdotal complaints. This, in turn, allows agencies to direct their resources toward the highest-risk conditions first. This includes the segments of road where cyclists and motorcyclists are most frequently and seriously exposed to surface hazards.
This technology is already in production across multiple state and local agencies, and the operational framework is well established. For transportation departments evaluating how to improve outcomes for vulnerable road users, the infrastructure monitoring question and the road safety question are increasingly the same.
May, the month of recognizing both bicyclists and motorcyclists, provides a timely moment to make that connection explicit. The tools to detect and address the conditions that put cyclists and motorcyclists at risk already exist. Agencies that close the gap between when a hazard appears and when it gets repaired are the ones making measurable progress on safety. Safer roads for cyclists and motorists should be achieved so we can protect their lives.
