The Trolly Stop Tampa Bay

August, earlier this year, Streetsblog USA posted a piece on the realities of deadly intersections and roads in Florida through the lens of a transportation activist in Orlando named Delila Smalley.

“Florida is home to eight of the 20 deadliest metros in America for pedestrians. But how does that constant thrum of traffic violence actually shape residents’ lives — and what are they doing to fight back?”

Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater ranks number 8 as the most deadly metro areas in the country.

Florida ranks number two as the most deadly for pedestrians.

Streetsblog showcased this Smart Growth America‘s video where Delila and other advocates (nearly all victims of car-to-pedestrian crashes) described the horrors faced along deadly Orlando roads.

Delila, who is also crash victim herself, lost her friend Danny to a woman who was putting on lipstick while turning at a large intersection located at S Orange Ave and Michigan St in Orlando.

Also in the video, Traffic Engineer Billy Hattaway mentioned less than 12 out of 2500 engineers he surveyed answered ‘yes’ if they have visited their own road projects to conduct a personal safety audit.

Kudos to Delila, Emily Bush (Crash Victim Bike/Walk Central Florida), Martin Derrow (crash victim local resident), Franki Gonzales (crash victim local resident) Billy and others who shared the challenges with pushing for safer Florida roads.

The video is embedded below. Please take just 6 minutes to understate the crisis that we must flip over in our busiest metro areas.

Streetsblog USA has always been an inspiration point to TSTB so we took a tangent from this article and looked at the widest intersections to cross in the downtowns of Tampa Bay.

We look at the following cities:
• Tampa
• Temple Terrace
• Plant City
• St. Petersburg
• Clearwater

We also added the Orlando intersection where Delila’s friend died as a comparison.

What found these intersections near their respected downtown exceeded 80 feet (none have medians or pedestrian islands) to cross by foot. We noted that a downtown Temple Terrace intersection is 141 feet wide compared to the 90 foot intersection in Orlando where Delila’s friend Danny died.

It is not say there are other points to cross these roads, or that there are worst or larger intersections to cross further away from downtown areas but why on earth do we have to exceed well beyond 20 feet to cross a DOWNTOWN road?

The point we want to make here is that local transportation and city mobility departments need to start setting a standard on capping downtown intersection widths where possible. While the idea of ‘bulbing/curbing out’, painting and installing medians and islands are great, we can’t imagine it makes sense to still maintain several lanes of cars (or add more) while encouraging pedestrian activity in a Central Business District-overall. We think the goal for some of these cites is to boost pedestrian activities. No matter if you have 50/50 mix of awesome crossings with pedestrian islands and several lanes for cars, steel and speed will win every time. Note the stats below.