Calgary Police kicked off Bike Safety Month with a three-slide Instagram post. Slide one: a title graphic. Slide two: cyclists 14 and up must ride on the road or in bike lanes, not the sidewalk; obey signals, signal turns, shoulder check, yield right-of-way. Slide three: never ride impaired, stay alert, distracted riding gets you fined.
Three slides. Zero mentions of drivers. Zero mentions of the street design that puts cyclists in the way of drivers in the first place.
That’s a pattern worth highlighting, because the data doesn’t support it.
The numbers don’t point where the campaign points
Cyclists dying on Calgary roads are not, overwhelmingly, dying because they rode on the sidewalk or missed a shoulder check. Nationally, Statistics Canada reports that Canada averages 74 cycling deaths a year, and 73 per cent of them involve a motor vehicle. The driver is in the crash almost three times out of four.
Drill down into how those collisions actually happen and the picture gets worse for the “cyclists need to behave better” framing. The City of Vancouver’s Cycling Safety Study found that doorings were the single most common type of reported cycling collision, at about 15.2 per cent, and right hooks (when a driver turning right into a cyclist going straight) accounted for another 12.6 per cent. Neither involves the cyclist doing anything wrong.
University of Toronto researchers put eye-tracking gear on drivers making right turns across bike lanes and found most of them (11 of 19) never checked for a cyclist at all before turning. The failure wasn’t unfamiliarity with the road. It was drivers who knew the area well enough to stop looking.
Then there’s dooring itself: a parked driver opens a door into a cyclist’s path with no warning and no time to react. Cyclists are legally required to ride close to parked cars. Fault for dooring sits almost entirely with the person who opened the door; and Bike Calgary’s guidance for cyclists reflects exactly that.
Right hooks, dooring, close passes. None of them show up in three slides of “what cyclists must do.” All three are things drivers do to cyclists, not the other way around.
Calgary’s own data says infrastructure is the fix
Calgary doesn’t need to import this insight. The city already proved it on its own streets.
When Calgary built its downtown cycle tracks, the city tracked the before-and-after. Unlawful sidewalk riding; the exact behaviour CPS is now telling cyclists to stop; dropped sharply on every route once the tracks went in. On 12 Avenue S, sidewalk riding fell to 3.3 per cent from 23 per cent before the cycle track existed.
Riding against traffic hit the city’s zero-percent target on both 5 Street SW and 12 Avenue S. Daily bike trips along the pilot corridors tripled in the two years after the network opened. The fix wasn’t a messaging campaign. It was separating bikes from cars.
The problem hasn’t gone away. The City of Calgary’s Safer Mobility Plan annual reports show 41 major injury cyclist collisions in 2023, 34 in 2024, and two cyclist fatalities in 2025; up from zero the year before.
The city’s own reporting also notes that cyclists show up disproportionately in emergency department visits compared to police-reported collisions, meaning a lot of crashes never make it into the official count at all. The danger is real, current, and almost certainly undercounted.
A poster telling cyclists to obey traffic signals doesn’t move any of those numbers.
The timing makes this worse, not better
CPS is running this campaign in the same season the infrastructure fight is actually happening. Alberta’s transportation minister, Devin Dreeshen, has been pushing Calgary and Edmonton to remove or pause bike lanes that he says interfere with vehicle traffic, and met with former Mayor Jyoti Gondek last summer to discuss it.
Late last year there was a back and forth between current Mayor Jeromy Farkas and Minister Dreeshen on bike lanes, with the latter wanting supportive data that bike lanes being installed weren’t compromising road capacity.
Meanwhile, Calgary’s own road-safety funding lags behind comparable cities. The Safer Mobility Plan’s own 2025 annual report notes the city spends roughly $5 million a year on mobility safety initiatives, compared to about $50 million in Edmonton and $80 million in Toronto.
So, the choice in front of Calgary right now isn’t abstract. It’s to keep building the separated infrastructure that’s already been shown to cut sidewalk riding and grow ridership, or cave to provincial pressure and let the existing gaps in the network stand.
CPS picked this month to put out three slides about cyclist conduct and said nothing about either side of that issue.
What an actual bike safety campaign looks like
It’s not that the cyclist-facing advice is wrong. Ride in the lane, signal your turns, don’t ride drunk. Fine, all true, all worth saying.
But a safety campaign that only ever talks to the person on the bike, while the person in the two-ton vehicle gets no message at all, isn’t really about safety. It’s about liability.
It puts the entire burden of avoiding a collision on the party with the least mass, the least speed, and the least protection, and calls that balance.
A real campaign would pair this with driver-facing messaging: Check your mirror before every right turn, look before you open a car door, give cyclists actual passing distance. It would say, out loud, that the safest thing the city can do for cyclists isn’t a poster; it’s more protected lanes, not fewer, and it’s road-safety investment that matches what peer cities are already spending, instead of getting traded away in a provincial fight over road capacity.
Calgary has the data to know this. It built the cycle tracks that proved it. Bike Safety Month, as currently written by CPS, asks cyclists to absorb a risk the city already knows how to design away.
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– Cody Littlefield is a dad and strategic designer based in Crescent Heights, Calgary. Originally from San Diego, California, he spends too much time thinking about how cities are built and whether his kids can safely cross the street.
