‘Deeply flawed:’ Asheville is worst in North Carolina for bicyclist deaths per capita

From 2015 to 2024, Asheville ranked first in North Carolina per capita in fatal bicyclist crashes. Here’s a look at the big problem in this western NC city and the potential solutions.

Alexander Rozos lounged on a climbing crash pad under a mid-July sun outside Cultivate Climbing, absorbing the heat and talking with his dad about joining the military in 60 days.

“My life is so dialed in right now with my training and personal relationships. If I died an hour from now, I didn’t waste a minute,” Michael Rozos remembered his son saying after a hard climb together on July 17, 2024.

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After ruminating on what the future could bring, Michael hugged his son goodbye. Alex hopped on his white 2024 Specialized road bike to ride home. He hardly ever drove, his father said.

“I said, ‘I’ll see you here tomorrow.’ That’s the last time I ever saw him,” Michael Rozos said.

The next day, Rozos, 26, was struck and killed by a white box truck while riding a bicycle west along Swannanoa River Road. The Haw Creek resident, cyclist and athlete had been recruited by the military on a fast track to the United States Army Special Forces, according to his father.

With a weekly cycling goal of 225 miles, Rozos said his son exposed himself “to so much of a deeply flawed cycle safety system” that choosing practical routes was impossible.

From 2015 to 2024, Asheville ranked first in the state per capita in fatal bicyclist crashes with cars and second per capita in total bike crashes and crashes resulting in fatal, severe or minor injury, according to North Carolina Department of Transportation data obtained by the Citizen Times.

“I said, ‘I’ll see you here tomorrow.’ That’s the last time I ever saw him.”

There have been seven cyclists killed on Asheville roads since 2021, as well as 165 injury-causing crashes and 211 total vehicle crashes with cyclists reported to NCDOT from 2015 to 2024. These numbers do not include crashes where there was no police report.

Not adjusting for population size, the city known as a premier biking destination ranks second behind Charlotte – the state’s largest city – for the number of cyclists killed on the road, the data shows.

“My feeling, emotionally and logically, is that Alex’s death was inevitable,” Rozos told the Citizen Times in mid-August.

The driver who struck Rozos was charged with felony hit and run causing serious injury or death and was indicted to Buncombe County Superior Court in November. His criminal case is ongoing.

Alexander Rozos

A lack of connectivity within bike routes

The League of American Bicyclists, a national bicycle advocacy organization, labeled Asheville as a bronze-level bicycle friendly community in 2024. Over 68% of their survey respondents said they are either somewhat or very dissatisfied with how the community is designed for safe cycling.

Other advocacy groups were less generous. Asheville’s cycling network was given a 9 out of 100 score from PeopleforBikes, a cycling advocacy group based in Boulder, Colorado, which rates the quality and connectedness of cycling infrastructure in cities across the country. The average for all cities in 2025 was a score of 30.

Part of the issue, cited by both groups, is gaps in connectivity within the existing cycling infrastructure and a lack of access by bike to jobs, schools, grocery stores and places where city residents live.

Asheville’s renowned cycling landscape has long beckoned some of America’s greats: Olympian and four-time Tour de France rider Brent Bookwalter, London Olympics silver medalist Lauren Tamayo and the Asheville-based UnitedHealthcare Pro Cycling Team.

Olympic level, Cat. 1 cyclists Jacob Hill, 32, and Leornard “Lennie” Antonelli, 27, also came to Asheville to train. Both were killed July 1 when a dump truck driver veered across the center lane, striking them head-on just as their lives were starting to soar, friends said.

Others get around on foot and bicycle out of necessity. About 8% of Asheville households do not have access to a vehicle, according to data cited in the city’s Close the GAP plan, adopted in 2022.

Complicated solutions

Local transportation professionals, cyclists and multimodal advocates say solutions are complicated on how to make Asheville’s roads more sustainable for walkers, runners and cyclists.

“From an overall safety picture, there are a lot of different components that have to be addressed to reverse some of the tragic trends that we’re seeing,” Tristan Winkler, director of the French Broad Metropolitan Planning Organization, told the Citizen Times in July.

The planning organization recently released a regional safety plan called “Safe Streets for WNC.” The plan highlights much of Asheville and the main southern corridor of Hendersonville Road in dark orange, signifying a “very high” risk level for cyclists.

When most of the region’s roads were built, the idea of complete streets was not considered in the construction process, Winkler said. NCDOT first adopted the policy in 2009 to incorporate safe transportation through walking, biking and public transit.

“With NCDOT starting to hopefully embrace complete streets a little more, hopefully we’ll start to see more projects having more of those components,” Winkler said.

The biggest struggle, especially over the past five years, has been funding and the impacts of inflation on construction costs, Winkler said. The increased cost has led to an “immense consolidation” of projects and what the MPO anticipates can be completed over the next 25 years is “generally much smaller.”

“In terms of bike/ped, we have hundreds of projects we want to do. We don’t have enough funding to accomplish all of that,” Winkler said.

Another compounding element is that Buncombe County has seen the highest rates of growth in unincorporated areas where there are no sidewalks, and where people of lower income are moving, Winkler said. More pedestrian activity and crashes are happening in areas where it traditionally has not occurred, at least not at the same rate.

The areas of the county that have lost population since 2000 are census tracts in two higher income areas: Biltmore Forest and North Asheville near Charlotte Street. These places have a higher rate of walking, biking and people taking shorter trips, Winkler said.

It’s what Susan Bean, environmental engagement coordinator for the environmental nonprofit MountainTrue, called a “sprawling” land use pattern and a “huge component” to the issue of pedestrian and cyclist safety in Asheville.

According to Bean, a “smarter way to grow” is to put more housing in town and more people in a tighter geographical circle so that city services, infrastructure and complete street funding can meet more needs.

Plans and implementation

Winkler mentioned two projects in the works to add more multimodal elements to Asheville-area streets. Haywood Road is set to get less than a mile of bike lanes in summer 2026, along with pedestrian upgrades. A widening project that includes bike lanes and sidewalks is in development on Amboy and Meadow roads. Construction is set to begin in Spring 2028.

Winkler said the region is unique in the level of bicycle and pedestrian planning that municipalities do, pointing to Asheville’s Close the GAP plan. But the issue is the implementation of the plans, according to Mike Sule, president of Asheville on Bikes, a nonprofit bicycle advocacy group.

“We have a culture of delay,” Sule told the Citizen Times in July.

Sule mentioned the city’s decision to scrap bike lanes on Biltmore Avenue after pushback from downtown business owners over detrimental impacts to traffic, curbside loading zones and the loss of a southbound travel lane.

He also pointed to the construction of bike lanes on College Street and Patton Avenue, which was recently delayed until 2026. The project was primarily delayed due to Tropical Storm Helene and to give downtown businesses “a reprieve from construction,” said Jessica Morriss, the city’s assistant director of transportation.

As one of the only east-west connectors in the city, Morriss said the College/Patton project will serve as a “multimodal corridor” when plans are actualized to add a safe facility for bicyclists, new crosswalks, fresh striping and ADA-compliant curb ramps.

“The downtown piece is kind of the keystone piece to having connectivity throughout,” Morriss said.

Sule had this advice for the city: “Push through the static of resistance.”

He pointed toward data from the Merrimon Avenue “road diet,” which drew heavy criticism over feared traffic delays. The diet converted a section of Merrimon Avenue from four lanes to three, adding 5-foot bike lanes along both sides of the road. While only increasing travel time by 2-14 seconds, the road remake showed a 30% reduction in injury-causing crashes and a 23% reduction in crashes overall, the Citizen Times reported.

Rozos said his son was dedicated to upholding a positive image of cyclists. He never biked on sidewalks. He never rolled through a red light. He never cut through a parking lot. His dedication to the cyclist’s image “was to the death.”

But in city leadership, Michael Rozos said he sees “nothing but the perpetual false date” for when progress will be made.

“The real threat is the front bumper of someone’s car, and you can’t get away from it in Asheville. We don’t even have little suburbs within Asheville that are connected by bike lanes or sidewalks,” Rozos said.

Everyone can imagine how it feels to lose a child and it’s exactly like people picture, Rozos said. The only difference is he’s living it.

The city has several plans in the pipeline at different stages, Morriss said, including:

• Sidewalk improvements on Airport Road are in design.
• The city just executed a design contract for the North Reed Creek Greenway Extension.
• Almost finished with design for a reconstruction of Cox Avenue that includes multimodal improvements.
• College and Patton ADA curb ramp improvements and bike lanes start in 2026.
• Plan to build a new Nasty Branch Greenway in 2026, from Grant Southside Center on Depot Street and Livingston Street to Phifer Street.
• The city is contracting to do sidewalk construction on London Road between Sweeten Creek and Belvedere.
• Working on retrofitting some sidewalk downtown on Lexington Avenue between Walnut and Woodfin.

Ryley Ober is the Public Safety Reporter for Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA Today Network. Email her at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @ryleyober

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: ‘Deeply flawed:’ Asheville ranks 1st in North Carolina for bicyclist deaths per capita

Reporting by Ryley Ober, Asheville Citizen Times / Asheville Citizen Times

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