By the time Ken Spicer arrived at the local medical center, where he is a practicing radiologist, he had lost more than half the blood in his body. As word spread among the physicians that one of their own had been injured, “everyone came down to see me,” he remembers. Then, “all of a sudden, boom, there was nobody there. Like a switch had been thrown.” While he was being treated another car had hit another biker, he learned later, and his trauma team had rushed to resuscitate, in vain, the second injured cyclist of the day. Eventually, Spicer was diagnosed with a spiral fracture of the femur. To reduce the pain from his shredded muscles, pins were inserted into his knee and a sandbag on a pulley hung from them. It was months before he could walk again.

Warm, flat, and scenic, the south should be a bike rider’s dream. But its palm trees and hanging moss stand watch over roadways badly in need of dedicated bike lanes, generous road shoulders, and more navigable urban centers. Beaux Jones, a Louisiana bike advocate, explained that apart from New Orleans, the cities in his state have inherited a structure, “that is somewhat antithetical to biking for pleasure or other purposes.” In contrast with compact cities like San Francisco or Portland, Baton Rouge “is a city that stretches across 35 miles,” he points out. Few choose to bike it.

Melody Moody, the executive director of Bike Walk Mississippi, explains that her state has “a big issue with a lack of paved shoulders. We’ve been working on that for years, but with less success than we would have hoped.”

A report on transportation spending by Advocacy Advance, a partnership between the Alliance for Biking and Walking and the League of American Bicyclists, found that the southern states spend, or plan to spend, the least on biking and walking safety infrastructure as a percentage of their total spending. Over the last few years, Massachusetts directed more than 5 percent of its transportation spending to bicycle and pedestrian facilities. In that same time period Louisiana, North Carolina, Florida, Alabama, South Carolina and Mississippi each devoted one half of one percent.

This lack of investment reflects limited coffers—as well as a limited number of bikers. In South Carolina, “we’ve had the third largest state roadway system, with the third lowest gas tax,” says Amy Johnson, director of the Palmetto Cycling Coalition in South Carolina. As a result, her state has a small budget that has to feed a fat road system hungry for upkeep. State planners are often more likely to view biking as recreation than transportation. “You’re dealing with a mentality that is focused on intrastate travel,” she says. They can be “very resistant to providing funding for construction, reconstruction, or moving lane markings.”

As Moody sees it, the best way to improve cycling conditions in southern states is to increase the number of riders. “We believe in the concept of ‘safety in numbers’ and overwhelmingly believe in the effort to increase ridership as a way to increased safety,” she says. Few would disagree with this conclusion. If drivers don’t expect to see cyclists on the roads, they won’t keep an eye out for them. The statistics in the benchmark study certainly suggest that, on a state-by-state basis, this is true. Eight of the 10 most dangerous states for biking in the U.S. see the fewest bike riders each year. All eight of these are southern. In Alabama, one of the most dangerous cycling states, less than one percent of commutes were performed by bike in 2012.