When two men died just a week apart while biking on Penn Avenue, the city mourned. Advocates called for greater safety and respect between motorists and cyclists. And for once, everyone on the city’s cramped streets agreed.

That’s the exception, not the rule. After most crashes, the gripes against bicyclists — how they run red lights, speed down one-way streets and cut across sidewalks — lead many people to assume they are more likely to be the cause of crashes than the motorists they cut off.

But six years of crash data obtained by the Post-Gazette show these common pet peeves are rarely the cause of serious accidents between bicycles and cars. Even though half the recorded accidents were ruled the bicyclists’ fault, aggression and inattentiveness by motorists account for some of the largest categories of accidents — an important point for advocates, who argue there’s already a disparity on the road between a 30-pound bicycle and a 2-ton SUV.

“Two fatal crashes in one week — that’s a call to arms,” said Scott Bricker, executive director of advocacy group Bike Pittsburgh. “With so many crashes, if every politician in and around Pittsburgh isn’t trying to figure out how can we address this, then something’s wrong.”

Read the full article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette