In 2005, 26 bicyclists were injured on Sussex County roads and one was killed, according to Delaware Department of Transportation and Delaware State Police records. In Kent and New Castle Counties last year, 60 others were injured and another died while riding a bike, according to those same records.
Especially with the amount of international students visiting the coastal area, whose main source of transportation is usually a bike, state and local officials have begun to recognize a hazardous situation.
Ocean View Police, in collaboration with the University of Delaware and DelDOT, recently held two bicycle checkpoints to help address the situation.
Between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. on June 30, 130 bicyclists rode through the checkpoint. And between the same times on July 8, 80 people rode through the checkpoint. On both nights, officials in attendance handed out helmets, fixed reflectors and lights to bikes and dispersed educational information, detailing how to follow the rules of the road on a bicycle. Ocean View Chief of Police Ken McLaughlin estimated that 90 percent of the 210 riders reached were international students.
“It was really noted last year that these folks are out there,” McLaughlin said. “They don’t know the rules of the road and they have no safety equipment to speak of. It was a real obvious hazard.”
McLaughlin and Delaware State Police Public Information Officer Master Cpl. Jeff Oldham said that bikers are required to follow the same rules of the road as cars. Driving on the right side of the road, and signaling turns, though, aren’t practices that all bicyclists uphold, they said — especially international students.
“There’s an influx of (international students) that comes in for the summer to work,” Oldham said. “The bicycle seems to be their main mode of transportation. They’re not familiar with the laws.”
The Delaware State Police, DelDOT, the University of Delaware and Sussex bicycling associations have also held checkpoints farther north on Route 1 to educate all bikers.
McLaughlin said he plans to expand the program next year. He wants to hold at least two each month to reach more bicyclists, some of whom ride from Dagsboro to Bethany Beach every day and night for work.
McLaughlin said, though, that the officials at the two checkpoints only reached about half of the bicyclists on the road. And his feeling that they didn’t reach them all was confirmed on day after the second checkpoint.
At 5:40 p.m. on July 9, an 18-year-old Russian woman named Katherina Tikhonravova was struck by a car at the intersection of Route 26 and Woodland Avenue and suffered, luckily, only a possible broken wrist.
Tikhonravova was hit by a car that was turning onto Woodland Avenue because she, McLaughlin said, was riding her bike on the wrong side of Route 26.
“What we’ve recognized is that there was a huge potential for there to be a fatal accident,” McLaughlin said. “There are so many close calls. We wanted to be a little proactive.”