Crime & Safety

Study: Route 9 in Ocean County Most Dangerous Road for Bicyclists

Nonprofit examined bike accident data in eight south Jersey counties to pinpoint danger areas

A new study on the relative safety of south Jersey roads for cyclists shows Route 9 is Ocean County’s most dangerous road for biking, and that over the last decade, Ocean had the highest number of bicycle accidents out of eight southern counties.

The Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a nonprofit that aims to reduce dependency on cars, released the study this week. It examines data on 8,281 bike accidents between 2001 to 2010 for Ocean, Atlantic, Burlington, Gloucester, Salem, Camden, Cumberland and Cape May counties, using the locations of the crashes to pinpoint areas most dangerous for cyclists.

Matthew Norris, an advocate with the nonprofit, said the organization focused on south Jersey for the study because they knew already that roads in the area were particularly dangerous for non-car traffic.

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“This is the first study of this kind looking at bicycle accidents that we’ve done,” he said. When the group examined , “we found that a lot of the most dangerous roads were in south Jersey.” 

When it came to bicycle crash rate, Ocean County ranked in the middle. The county’s total number of crashes – 213 – was the highest of all the counties surveyed. But Ocean’s relatively large population, which the study puts at 543,742, made for a rate of 3.92 bike crashes per 10,000 residents. 

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Cape May County, ranked as the most dangerous for cyclists, had a rate of 8.42 crashes per 10,000 people.

Researchers also looked at where the accidents occurred, and determined that more than 30 percent of the crashes in the county happened on four roads. 

Route 9 is Ocean County’s most dangerous road for cyclists, with 11.2 percent of crashes. Route 35, the main road through the barrier island communities east of Toms River, was the site of 8 percent of bike accidents. Route 88 and Route 549 each had 5.8 percent of crashes. 

Matthew Norris of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign said most of the dangerous roads his organization identified had several things in common.

“It’s really about the design of the roadways, and the fact that they were designed a long time ago,” he said. “Typically, they are these arterials” – high-traffic secondary roads – “that have multiple lanes of traffic in both directions.” They also lack bike lanes or even a continuous wide shoulder that could accommodate bikes, he said. There might be a shoulder for a short stretch, “and then, without warning, the bicyclist is forced into traffic.”

They dangerous roads tend to lack sidewalks, too, Norris said, making them dangerous for pedestrians as well.

The roads simply weren’t designed with walkers and bikers in mind, Norris said. “But pedestrians and cyclists are using them, and we want to encourage that sort of thing,” he said, for health and environmental reasons. 

Making a street safer for bicycles can be as simple as painting an extra stripe to designate a bike lane, Norris said. It gets more complicated when roads are too narrow to accommodate the extra lane. But that’s where the New Jersey Department of Transportation’s Complete Streets policy comes in.

The rules, passed in December 2009, require new or rehabilitated roads to be built for all users, including pedestrians, cyclists, transit riders and drivers. It’s a key step for the state, said Norris, but there’s more work to be done. 

“What we’re really trying to highlight here is that it’s the design of the road that makes the condition so unsafe,” he said. Now that the state has adopted broader design as policy, communities will start seeing their roads updated, he said, “but we need to see changes in the near term as well.”


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