No highway bike deaths at Delaware beaches this year

• Riders effectively making new Del. 1 sidewalks their bike lanes.
• New on-demand red lights at crosswalks well-used, DelDOT says.
• Two Rehoboth Beach residents died as they were walking across Del. 1.

Knock on wood, but so far it's held: No one has died in a bicycle crash or a pedestrian accident on the busiest stretch of Del. 1 this summer.

Is that a happy statistical accident, welcomed after recent summers marred by one or more deaths from those kinds of collisions? Or is it a direct consequence of the millions of dollars Delaware spent over the past two years finally filling gaps in the highway's sidewalks, along with adding high-tech crosswalks to the corridor?

Safety advocates and transportation officials say there's a plausible case the improvements are paying safety dividends already.

"Somebody could be getting hit right now," acknowledged Mark Luszcz, chief traffic engineer for the Delaware Department of Transportation. "It's hard to make a one-to-one correlation. We certainly had a spike a few years ago. Certainly, the project that's been implemented is, in our view, a vast improvement over what was out there before."

One major reason: Enticed by a now-continuous sidewalk route on both sides of the commercial corridor — this time last year, many spots that are now paved were covered in grass or dirt — bicyclists are choosing to ride there instead of a lane of traffic designated for buses, bikes and right-hand turns by any vehicle.

The new sidewalk, in practice, has become a new bike lane.

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And even bike safety advocates who usually urge bikers to ride in vehicle lanes, as traffic laws encourage, say they understand the impulse to stick to the sidewalk, faced with what can be terrifying traffic on Del. 1 at the beaches.

"I’m glad to see some of these cyclists riding on the sidewalk. But you have to use extreme caution riding on the sidewalk," says Mike Tyler of Sussex Cyclists, a group that for years has offered free lights, reflectors and helmets to seasonal workers who only have bikes to get around. "If I ride, I'm going to ride on the shoulder and ride defensively. But I'd rather they ride on the sidewalk than the wrong way on the shoulder."

Rehoboth, Dewey, Bethany Beach and Fenwick Island's restaurants and retail stores rely heavily on foreign student workers — many of them college-age, from European or Eastern European countries — to staff up in the summer. The student workers rent apartments, often work two different jobs a day, and almost always pick up used bikes to commute. Oftentimes, they are the people you see at night, biking slowly home in the dark as bright headlights whiz by.

In recent years, as the beach-town corridor has grown even more congested, accidents involving foreign student workers on bikes and on foot have highlighted obstacles and danger spots that threatened all pedestrians and bicyclists on Del. 1. In 2014, a 22-year-old Romanian, Andreea B. Roman, working for the summer at the Rehoboth Beach Country Club was critically injured when her bike collided with a motor scooter on Del. 1.

In 2012, two Rehoboth Beach residents died as they were walking across Del. 1 -- one of them pushing a bike -- at night and were struck by oncoming traffic. The spot they crossed at wasn't a signaled and painted crosswalk, but until the Department of Transportation completed its $6.5 million project to add sidewalks and signals earlier this year, there were multi-mile gaps between the very few crosswalks spanning the highway in the resort area.

Last summer, a 19-year-old Ukranian student, Nadiia Misa, died crossing the highway on a bike against a signal. Again, the accident happened in darkness, not daylight.

This year, there's been one fatal bike accident at the Delaware coast. Anastasia Ciolpan, 20, of Moldova, died July 1 after the cyclist was struck by a car on June 29, in a hit-and-run crash. But Ciolpan was riding on Kent Avenue on Bethany Beach, not in the busier Lewes-Rehoboth corridor where most of those accidents have happened.

Nicolai Mocionita, 23, of Romania, was riding a bike in the right-hand lane of Del. 1 Tuesday, approaching Rehoboth Beach. He works one shift at Sunsations and another at a Grotto Pizza, he said, motivated to spend the summer here by earning money and polishing his English.

"I don't know how many miles, but, like 30 minutes," he said of his commute. "So it's a one-hour day, to go and come back." And he said he felt perfectly comfortable riding in the bike lane: "I'm very careful."

Vasil, a Bulgarian student worker who declined to give his last name, was less sanguine about riding on Del. 1. Twice this summer, he said, he's had collisions with cars there. "I had some light injuries," he said, shrugging. "It happens. It was hit-and-run. At least I landed in the grass." As he spoke, other foreign workers biked past him, on the sidewalk.

Other bike riders, year-round Cape Region residents and beach house owners, interviewed in the corridor said they would never consider riding in the highway.

"I only ride in my neighborhood. It's too tough [on Del. 1]. The traffic is a killer," said Ron Wyngate, of Milton. "It's dangerous out here even in my car."

Adrianna Berk, 41, of Manassas, Virginia, helped her three young children, ages 10, 8, and 6, cross Del. 1 one afternoon at Holland Glade Road. She relied on a new HAWK beacon at the marked crosswalk to do it. The system lets pedestrians hit a button to request a crossing cycle, and in concert with the traffic lights at the other end of the block, flashing yellow and then solid red stoplights halt traffic briefly. It's basically an on-demand red light.

Berk said her family would never have tried to bike from their beach home to outlets and restaurants that are less than a mile away, but across Del. 1, before the new crosswalks were installed last year. Now, she said, they do, but they stick to the highway's sidewalks once they're here.

"I don't see a necessity to ride on Route 1, so I'm not going to," Berk said. Still, she said, "we ride bikes way more here than we do at home."

Luszcz said the HAWK crossings have proved popular. The Holland Glade one Berk used, he said, was activated 71 times in a four-hour chunk of daytime on July 26, when traffic engineers took a count.

One afternoon this week, several sets of pedestrians using it looked impatient as they waited in the middle of the highway, where there's a median for them. The crosswalk's signals are timed to get people across one side of the highway, and then have them wait while the other side of traffic flows for a minute or so until stopping traffic and letting them finish the crossing.

Tyler notes that tempts some pedestrians to jaywalk for the second half of the crossing. But Luszcz says the staged pattern is the best way to keep vehicle traffic at the crossings, and at the intersections upstream from them, from getting tied in knots.

"If we have to time it to get you all the way across the street, that's a long time," Luszcz said. "It's not ideal. We would prefer to be able to cross pedestrians all in one shot. But in a congested area, when I have all these conflicting demands, we make tradeoffs."

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Contact James Fisher at (302) 983-6772, on Twitter@JamesFisherTNJorjfisher@delawareonline.com.