Eighty-four percent were hit by the front of the vehicle.
Not clipped by a wing mirror. Not sideswiped. The driver drove into them, and that single figure reframes what a close pass actually is.
Of the 1,035 cyclists killed in 2024 in single-vehicle crashes where the first harmful event was the collision itself, 869 were struck by the front of the vehicle. That is 84 percent.
Right-side impacts accounted for 6.4 percent. Left side, 1.5 percent. Rear impacts, 1.4 percent.
What that rules out
The mental image of a cyclist being killed often involves contact at the edge of a vehicle: a wing mirror, a trailer catching a shoulder, a sideswipe from a driver who misjudged the gap by inches. Those crashes happen, and they injure a lot of people.
They are not, overwhelmingly, what kills. The front of a vehicle is the part that arrives first when a driver is travelling toward something and does not stop or steer away. Eighty-four percent front impact describes a failure to perceive or a failure to react, not a failure to judge a gap by a foot.
The distinction matters because the two failures have different remedies. A misjudged gap is addressed by giving drivers a rule and a way to internalise the distance. A driver who never registered a person in the road is not helped by a rule about how much room to leave.
The vehicle that does it
Light trucks — the category covering SUVs, pickups and vans — were involved in 552 of those 1,035 deaths. Passenger cars accounted for 282. Light trucks killed roughly twice as many cyclists as cars did.
In 89 percent of the light-truck cases the rider was struck by the front. For SUVs specifically the front-impact share was 91.1 percent.
We would be careful with the causal claim here. This table reports what was involved, not a rate: it does not tell you risk per mile driven, and light trucks are a very large share of the American fleet. A higher count partly reflects there being more of them. What the front-impact share does suggest, and what the vehicle-design literature has argued for years, is that a taller, blunter front changes what happens to a human body at the moment of contact.
Where the pattern inverts
Buses and large trucks look different. Right-side impacts accounted for 25 percent of bus-involved deaths and 20 percent of large-truck deaths, against 5 percent for passenger vehicles. Large trucks also had the highest rear-impact share at 9 percent.
That is the classic heavy-vehicle geometry: the blind spot alongside a long vehicle, and the turn that closes the space a rider is occupying. It is a genuinely different crash from the one that kills the other 95 percent, and it is the one most urban cycling policy has been built around.
What we can and cannot see
A rear-facing camera measuring lateral clearance sees the approach. It does not see the impact, and we are not going to pretend the two are the same event.
But a front impact is preceded by an approach, and the approach is measurable. A vehicle that passes at eighteen inches was aimed at a point very close to a person for the whole time it was closing. Whether that particular driver would have hit someone is unknowable. Whether a stretch of road produces those approaches at a higher rate than the next one is exactly the kind of question a lot of measured passes can answer, and nobody is currently asking it with data.
Source: NHTSA, Traffic Safety Facts: Bicyclists and Other Cyclists, 2024 Data (DOT HS 813 822, July 2026), Table 5.