By Steven Logan

When someone dies on the street, the police outline the body. Imagine for a moment if outlines were made permanent so passersby could see that someone died there.

The straight white lines that turn city streets into racetracks would be interrupted with the curves of heads, feet, legs and bodies. In 2005, we would have had to make 337 outlines for cyclists and pedestrians who died on Czech streets. All in all, 1,127 people died and 4,396 were seriously injured in almost 200,000 car accidents in 2005. In 2004, the rate of fatalities per million people was 40 percent higher than the European Union average.

On Jan. 6, Jan Bouchal, coordinator of the Auto*Mat project and chairman of Oživení, both of which promote cycling, was cycling home from his work in Malá Strana. A car struck him at the intersection of nábřeží kapitána Jaroše and Dukelských hrdinů in Prague 7. Six days after the accident, the 30-year-old died.

There were 30 accidents at the crossroads in 2004. In 2003, three people were seriously injured there. Five years ago, the city was alerted to the intersection's dangers. Since the accident, I have stood on one of the traffic islands and watched all the near misses, all the crashes barely avoided. Bouchal attempted to draw attention to it in his work with Auto*Mat, a project aimed at making Prague a safer city for cyclists, pedestrians and anyone who does not want to get swallowed up by society's obsession with automobiles.

The city is slow to change. There are 60 kilometers (37 miles) of bike paths in Prague, but the majority of these are on the periphery. The yellow signs throughout the city center are not bike paths; these are simply cycle routes. Last year, the city had 28 million Kč ($1.2 million) available for cycling support, but of this, only 18 million Kč was actually used.

Libor Šíma, head of transport management for Prague, cites a number of problems, such as incomplete documentation and the inability to acquire the land, which is often privately owned, to build bicycle lanes. Bicycle lanes do not have the status of public infrastructure, as is the case with roads. And anyway, said Šíma, cyclists are just one group and there needs to be a balance among all transportation modes.

Since 1999, Prague has only laid out 300 meters (990 feet) of dedicated bicycle lanes in the city itself. Bicycle transportation should not be something to be merely tacked on to an already existing automobile-based system. Without space to move, people riding bicycles are left to navigate speeding cars, trams and other dangerous obstacles.

Šíma made his comments at a discussion organized as part of a night in Bouchal's memory. The discussion brought cycling advocates together with city officials and an audience angry over Bouchal's death and the lack of initiative on the part of the city to make change. (Robert Šťastný, head of the Transportation Ministry's BESIP safe-streets program, had originally agreed to participate in the discussion. When he was called the day before the discussion, his office said he was in Ostrava and so, obviously, would not be attending.)

Zdeněk Bambas, director of Prague's transport police, felt it necessary to say right from the outset that although he saw many cyclists (ostensibly from the Critical Mass bike ride that had happened just before the discussion) wearing reflective vests and having bright lights, he saw two cyclists who were dressed in black, with no lights! Two cyclists. If people were not already pissed, they certainly were now.

To the Czech Republic's credit, there is a national cycling strategy (cyklostrategie.cz) and Bouchal himself believed that in the past two years the city of Prague had truly started to work on providing for cycling transport, but that they were still at the very beginning. In an interview in the A2 cultural weekly given only a few days before Bouchal's crash, he said, "After five years of activity, we realize that it is not a problem of enough engineering, money and technical know-how. It is a question of political will. Billions of crowns in investments like metro or ring roads get support. Cycling, in the meantime, does not."

Although there is clearly inadequate space for people to bike safely in Prague, pedestrians are even more vulnerable. Every year, more than 200 pedestrians die on Czech streets. Several are killed or seriously injured when drivers do not respect the pedestrians' right of way at the zebra crossing: In 2005, 21 died and 192 were severely injured in crosswalks; over the past five years, 122 died and 1,028 were severely injured there.

People running across zebra crossings is a familiar site in Prague, so much so that when one walks across them at a regular pace, drivers take it as an insult. Bambas says the police's hands are tied because speeding fines are just too low. "Everyone wants their place under the sun," responded Bambas to the numerous problems pointed out during the discussion.

Like a speeding car cutting across a cyclist's path, someone strolling along a path can be equally surprised by a cyclist. The problem here is that many of Prague's dedicated cycle lanes are for pedestrians as well. Try walking in a bike lane in Berlin or Amsterdam and see how long you survive the morning rush hour. Out of the major European cities, people in Prague are the least likely to cycle or walk to work — a testament to the conditions here.

By the end of 2005, there were more than 808,000 vehicles in Prague. Overall, in 2005, there were almost 4,000 more accidents in Prague than in 2004. The city is not getting any safer.

If we actually need reminding, the statistics I have raised here connect to real people with family, friends and co-workers. They are not just numbers, but unfortunate participants in real, bloody and violent encounters that take their toll. What is more, in a car-obsessed culture the car accident, writes Jorg Beckmann, executive director of the European Transport Safety Council, is something to be denied, an aberration in an otherwise efficient technology. The road is quickly cleaned of all evidence of the accident. However, when an accident is brought to the public's attention through the media (as was certainly the case with Bouchal) or through flowers placed at the site, there is a refusal to forget that an accident happened here and to allow traffic to return to "normal." The more deaths and injuries are publicly remembered, the more the city might be pressured into doing something to prevent more absurd losses of life.

The outline of Jan Bouchal's body is no longer there, wiped away by snow and the heavy traffic that edges along this Prague embankment. Instead, at the site of the accident there is a monument — a small, white bike, a ghost bike, placed there after the monthly Critical Mass bike ride Jan. 19, part of the memorial evening. Almost 100 cyclists met at Jiřího z Poděbrad on the cold evening, only a few days after a snowstorm, and slowly rode through the city to the accident site, where another 50 people were waiting, crowded onto the traffic island. The ghost bike sits on that island, chained to a pole and surrounded by candles and flowers, with a sign that reads: "Zde srazilo auto cyklistu" — a car struck a cyclist here.

—The author is co-editor of Car Busters magazine, a project of the