A Systemic Fix for Cycling Safety: The Promise of Bike-to-Car Communication

By far, the worst thing about road riding is that you have to share the road with cars. Cyclists on a 20-pound bike, wearing nothing but Lycra and a styrofoam hat, shouldn't be anywhere near 4,000lb contraptions traveling at 60 mph. Unfortunately, whether cyclists are riding on the road for sport or transportation, they are putting their life in the hands of flawed humans who are controlling these industrial-aged contraptions from a pile of heated pillows within the inner folds of the machines. In the US alone, 1,166 cyclists were killed in accidents with cars in 2024; there are an additional 130,000 cyclists injured annually on US roads. This is about 40x the number of skydiving and rock climbing deaths combined per year. Lots of people blame distracted drivers for these accidents, and while they are part of the problem, this is a systemic problem and requires a system-wide solution.

Just like when a person is sick with the flu, the doctor doesn't inject an antibiotic medicine into each infected cell individually; they administer a system-wide solution that makes the whole body healthier simultaneously. In the context of road cycling safety, there are a few potential systematic ways to make the roads safer. The best solution is likely to make infrastructure improvements like protected bike lanes that would keep cars and cyclists rightfully separated. However, this solution would be really expensive and slow to implement. Another, much quicker, cheaper, and more realistic solution is a technical one. This is the solution that the company Spoke is working on.

I just learned about the work that Spoke is doing from coverage of Eurobike last weekend, and it is an innovative solution to make our roads safer for cyclists. The problem that Spoke is trying to address is for a cyclist to be seen and avoided on the roads. The driver needs to both physically be able to see the cyclist and be paying enough attention to recognize the cyclist as an obstacle that they need to maneuver the car around. What Spoke is working on is a radio communication protocol that could be implemented between cars and bikes so that a car can electronically “see” a rider that is on the road and alert the driver, so their attention is brought back to the cyclist.

My understanding is that basically the cyclist would have a device that transmits a radio signal. Then, as a car approaches, the car will be able to pick up the signal and alert the driver that there is a cyclist approaching. This system would work both ways too; it would also alert the cyclist when a car is approaching from behind. It seems like this technical solution would go a long way to make the roads safer because it would make it much more likely that the cyclist is seen by the driver of the car.

For a system like this to gain adoption, Spoke will have a lot of educating to do directly to auto manufacturers to convince them to build it into their cars. It sounds like Spoke has been working with the Audi group and the Stellantis family of brands, which include Jeep, Dodge, Chrysler, Fiat, and others. This is a good launching point for adoption, and hopefully more brands will follow as the technology becomes closer to launching and actually available. It will be exciting to follow this attempt to provide a technological solution to a real-world problem, and hopefully they will be successful in their goal to make our roads safer for cyclists.