The road was dark and wet when cyclist Sean Hayes was hit and killed by an on-duty police officer in South Burlington earlier this month. Hayes, 38, was towing a trailer as he pedaled south on Shelburne Road just before 3 a.m. on November 11, destination unknown. His death was the sixth since 2020 along the busy thoroughfare, which is also known as Route 7. That's nearly half of the 13 bicyclists and pedestrians killed in Chittenden County over the same time frame. The fatal crash has galvanized transportation activists to push for an overhaul of Shelburne Road, where ongoing development — including of much-needed housing and homeless services — is bisected by high-speed drivers. The activists want to reduce the number of driving lanes along the suburban stretch of Route 7 from five to three and add bike or bus lanes as part of a larger transformation. That proposal might seem far-fetched for a road that carries more than 30,000 drivers each day, but a quick, life-saving fix may not exist. In the days following Hayes' death, Local Motion, a bike-walk advocacy group, began calling for local and state officials to convene a joint task force to reexamine the design of Shelburne Road with pedestrians and cyclists in mind. And a citizen group called Vermonters for People-Oriented Places organized a mass bike ride to a recent Burlington City Council meeting to demand action. Officials don't seem eager to take drastic steps, and they point to data that show the stretch, from South Burlington to Shelburne, isn't among the state's most dangerous. An analysis by the Vermont Agency of Transportation, for instance, found that most of the serious crashes along Shelburne Road involving pedestrians and cyclists have been caused by intoxication and people disregarding the law rather than road design flaws. Since 2019, all but one of 10 crashes there involved "unsafe or erratic behavior on the part of the pedestrian or the cyclist," said Erin Sisson, deputy chief engineer of VTrans' highway division. Other stretches in the state, such as West Street in Rutland, have much higher rates of crashes involving cyclists and pedestrians, she added. Shelburne Road "is definitely on the radar, but it hasn't risen to the high-crash locations where we could have an infrastructure-related impact," Sisson said. Yet crash analysis alone misses the bigger conundrum of Shelburne Road, advocates contend. Road users make mistakes…