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Photos: Courtesy of Dan Langenkamp

Turning Tragedy into Advocacy

Four years after the bicycling death of the American diplomat Sarah Debbink Langenkamp ’02, her husband is fighting for safer roadways.

For nearly twenty years, US diplomat Sarah Debbink Langenkamp ’02 and her husband Dan worked together as foreign service officers for the State Department, serving around the world in places like Haiti, Uganda, and Iraq. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the couple sent their two young sons to live with their grandparents and moved to the country’s western border. They spent six months in a war zone, helping to coordinate defense supplies for the Ukrainian government. Then, late in the summer of 2022, the Langenkamps decided to evacuate Ukraine and return to safety at home in America. “We just couldn’t be apart from our kids,” Dan recalled recently. 

Tragically, their reunion was short-lived. Only a few weeks after Sarah and Dan returned to Maryland, Sarah was struck and killed by a truck while riding her bike home from an open house at their sons’ school. She was using a designated bike lane on the three-mile trip. Dan was devastated. He was also furious. “I was so angry that she died this way,” he said, filled with emotion as he recalled the loss four years later. The day after Sarah’s death, Dan began researching bike safety laws and cyclist fatalities on roadways. He was shocked by what he discovered. In the year Sarah died, he said, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported that 1,105 bicyclists were killed by motorists, the largest number since 1975. Dan also learned that 2022 marked a forty-year peak in US pedestrian deaths. “I just thought, we have to do something about this problem,” he said.

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Sarah Debbink Langenkamp, seen here with her husband Dan and their two sons, was struck and killed by a truck while riding her bike in 2022.

He channeled his grief into action. Today, Dan Langenkamp is the founder of Ride For Your Life, a nonprofit that supports grassroots bike safety organizations and advocates for national and local policies to improve bicyclist and pedestrian safety. It all started with a GoFundMe campaign that had an initial goal of raising $50,000. Within days, more than $300,000 had been donated. “Money just started flooding in, which is a testament to who Sarah was,” Langenkamp said. These funds were used for Ride For Your Life’s inaugural benefit bike ride in Washington, DC, in 2022, which retraced Sarah’s final route before continuing on to a rally at the US Capitol. The event brought together two thousand cyclists and spurred the creation of the bipartisan Sarah Debbink Langenkamp Active Transportation Safety Act. That set of reforms would give states far more leeway to use federal highway money to improve infrastructure for bicyclists and pedestrians, such as by linking disjointed bike paths into contiguous networks that don’t cross busy roads. The federal bill that includes these reforms has passed the House and is now waiting to be taken up by the Senate.  

Since 2022, Ride For Your Life has hosted eleven events across five cities, involving more than ten thousand participants. “Our formula is to link a ride to a legislative ask,” said Langenkamp, whose organization has so far helped to advance five pieces of safety legislation. In Maryland, for instance, the Sarah Debbink Langenkamp Memorial Act was passed into law, resulting in increased fines and jail time for drivers that kill or cause serious injury to people riding bikes, scooters, or electric assistive devices. Ride For Your Life’s advocacy also contributed to the introduction of a federal act that would require all new cars to include automatic emergency braking systems that are sensitive to cyclists.

Langenkamp said his ultimate goal is to host ten rides annually. “If we’re able to pass three laws in three states this year, and then five laws, then seven, then eight,” he said, “we’ll be making a big difference every single year.” ◽

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