MACON, Ga. — Fred Simonelli's been riding his bike since he was in the second grade. It's one of his favorite things because it reminds him of being a kid again.
He said he rides about 100 miles a week, mostly in rural areas where he notices people not respecting bicyclists.
"Just driving around, I mean, even in your car, you- you see people not using their turn signals and things like that," he said.
Additionally, he said he's seen distracted drivers, and drivers who completely break Georgia's road laws. One of them is Georgia law, § 40-6-56.
"So if you are passing a bicyclist, you have to give them at least three feet to pass, to go around them," Executive Director of Bike Walk Macon Rachel Umana said.
Umana founded the nonprofit after realizing Macon wasn't very friendly for non-drivers.
"Our roads and our streets are primarily designed and funded by, strictly with cars in mind," she said.
And that's where her team comes in.
"What we're trying to change is asking the people who design our roads and fund our roads to think about how we can design them and fund them with everyone in mind," Umana said.
Over the years, she said the county's added more bike lanes. But she believes that's not enough.
"We still have really fast traffic; we have a lot of traffic," Umana said. "And so what would make bicyclists more comfortable is if we could be more bold and dedicate funding to building protected bikeways."
She believes this would help keep bicyclist crash deaths down in Macon-Bibb. From 2017 to 2021, the county had no fatalities from bicyclist crashes.
But over the past couple years, those numbers have gone up.
In 2022, two people died while biking in Macon-Bibb, and in 2023 another person died, too.
Simonelli agrees that better safety features, like protected bikeways that have a barrier between the biker and the cars, would make him feel safer.
"There's a lot of times when you just feel like people have come by you too close. So you're constantly looking back to see what's coming up behind you," he said.
Simonelli and Umana both want drivers to remember that bicyclists can't go as fast as cars, so patience from drivers is needed.