Vera Arias glides north along Federal Highway during morning rush hour, her black Republic road bike fast and light beneath her. All her senses are heightened at this intersection near the Miami-Dade/Broward County line, the worst part of her daily ride to work. Cars zoom past and honk aggressively. To her left, in her peripheral vision, she notices a burgundy minivan.

Suddenly, before she can react, it swerves in front of her, its right side crashing into her left shoulder. She flies ten feet through the air and lands headfirst. Her helmet snaps off her head.

As she’s sprawled on the hot pavement of a busy Hollywood road, her heart pulses. Breath heaves in her chest. She peels her head off the ground and catches sight of her bike, bent and mangled next to her, and the contents of her backpack scattered all over the street.

But the ordeal doesn’t end there. The driver of the car, an 81-year-old with white hair, leaps out of his van and hovers over her.

“You’re so stupid,” he shouts over and over. “Why didn’t you stop?! You’re an idiot!”

Any regular cyclist in Miami-Dade will tell you that hopping onto a bike here is an act of faith. Drivers use major thoroughfares as speedways and then rage at cyclists who dare to cross their path. Bike lanes end as randomly as they began. Cyclists are eternally frustrated by a lack of simple changes to keep them alive.

By all measures, Miami is one of the nation’s least safe cities on two wheels. Florida as a whole has the most bicycle fatalities in the nation and has the four deadliest cities for cyclists. (Miami is fourth, after Jacksonville, Tampa, and Orlando.) Between 2010 and 2014, 47 cyclists died across Miami; another 3,591 were injured.

“In Miami, you have to ride aggressively in order to make yourself seen,” says Karim Nahim, manager of the Miami Bicycle Shop, who’s been riding in Miami since the ’90s. “Any way you ride here, it’s dangerous.”

South Florida has made improvements in recent years. Miami now boasts an expansive bike-sharing program, a smattering of green bike lanes, and signs that signal to drivers to “share the road.” Yet statistically, things are actually getting worse. Across Miami-Dade, fatalities jumped a startling 260 percent between 2012 and 2014, while injuries increased 34 percent.

One major project altering the conversation is the Underline, which would transform the underutilized land beneath Miami’s Metrorail line from the Miami River to the Dadeland South Station into a bike-friendly greenway. Meg Daly, founder and president of Friends of the Underline, a nonprofit organization leading the project, has been meeting with people such as developers and state officials for the past two years.

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