Safe Streets Week: Making roads safer for pedestrians, bicyclists

People working to make roads safer in the Tampa Bay area don’t call traffic collisions “accidents.” They call them crashes.

Calling them accidents implies that the crash was unpreventable, says Lisa Silva, principal planner with the Hillsborough Traffic Planning Organization, under the umbrella of Plan Hillsborough.

"The crashes that we have are preventable, and we have to find a way to prevent them. There’s only a few rare ones that are true accidents,’’ she says.

Making streets safe for pedestrians, bicyclists and drivers is the theme of the Safe Streets Week events happening Oct. 8 through Oct. 10 in Tampa. The key event will be “A Community Conversation with National Leaders,’’ featuring Gil Penalosa, an expert on designing and correcting streets to make them safe for pedestrians and bicyclists; and safe driving activist Jessica Riester Hart, whose 5-year-old daughter, Allison, was killed in 2021 by a driver who ran a stop sign.

The event is 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday, October 10th at the Seminole Garden Center, 5800 N, Central Ave. It is free and open to the public, but organizers ask those attending to register.

Penalosa, of Toronto, is founder of 8-80 Cities.

“If you design cities, including their streets, for an 8-year-old and an 80-year-old, then they are inclusive and equitable for all,’’ says Silva, explaining the name.

8-80 CitiesGil Penalosa, an expert on designing and correcting streets to make them safe for pedestrians and bicyclists and founder of 8-80 Cities“He is very eloquent in explaining these challenging planning and engineering terms in plain English and simple concepts very inspirationally, and he has great images that tell the story of how to inspire this great design of cities and roads,’’ she adds.

Plan Hillsborough is one of the sponsors of Safe Streets Week, which includes events featuring the Gulf Coast Safe Streets Summit, an organization of eight West Florida counties, the Tampa Downtown Partnership Debriefing Series, a Florida Pedestrian and Bicycle Coalition meeting and Walk to School Day on Oct. 9.

“I’m very pleased that we have all these events occurring where people can get out of their car and experience the streetcar and Water Street and all the great things going on. That’s what Safe Streets week is all about,’’ Silva says.

Walk Bike Tampa, also a sponsor of Safe Streets Week events, is bringing in Hart to speak.

“I think one of the things that she’s going to talk about is how important it is for everybody to slow down and take their time, because we’re operating heavy machinery and people’s lives are on the line,’’ says Beth Alden, a board member of Walk Bike Tampa, a citizens group that formed nine years ago to promote designing and correcting streets to make them safe for pedestrians and bicyclists.

Dangerous region for pedestrians

The Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater metro area ranked as the fourth most dangerous area in the country for pedestrians in 2022, according to Smart Growth America’s Dangerous by Design Report.

Hart’s daughter was on her bike in a crosswalk with her father, Bryan, in Washington D. C. when a driver in a van ran a stop sign and killed her.

“It’s just a nightmare,’’ Hart told a reporter with Vox, the news website, in 2022. “But also it’s just like, my daughter dies and nothing changes. How could that be?”Families for Safe StreetsFamilies for Safe Streets member Jessica Riester Hart, whose 5-year-old daughter, Allison, was killed in 2021 by a driver who ran a stop sign

Hart joined Families for Safe Streets, started by Amy Cohen, who lost her son, Sammy, killed by a van driver in New York City in 2013. The group campaigns for safer streets for pedestrians and bicyclists and against the increasing size of SUVs and trucks.

The large vehicles strike pedestrians higher up the body than low-profile cars and with much more force, increasing the likelihood of death when pedestrians or bicyclists are struck. They also have blind spots that make it more difficult for the driver to see pedestrians, especially children, according to experts who study the issue.

Hart told the Vox reporter that her efforts seem like a futile endeavor, but she continues trying.

“It won’t bring her back,’’ she said. “But I just can’t let it go.”
 
Tampa’s ambitious program of safety projects

The City of Tampa and Hillsborough County are committed to Vision Zero, a goal to have no traffic fatalities at all by 2050.

That means designing roads that are safe for all, with separated and protected bike lanes, sidewalks on both sides, crosswalks in the middle of the block and islands in the middle of the road. Such roads tend to slow traffic down, and speed is the number one factor as to whether a crash is minor, severe or fatal., Silva says, noting that the whole state of Florida ranks high in the number of bicycle and pedestrian deaths.

We have designed our roadways for vehicular movement instead of a comprehensive approach, Silva says.

“And it takes some time to reverse that and shift the culture, which is a goal of the summit,’’ she says.

In Alden’s vision for Tampa, she says small neighborhood streets are fine the way they are “as long as there are some stop signs and speed tables and people actually obey the stop signs.”

“But then you get into a slightly bigger road, let’s say a collector road,” she says.”You need to be able to move some cars through there, that’s fine, but let’s have sidewalks on both sides and let’s have crosswalks that are not spaced a mile apart.’’

The City of Tampa and Hillsborough County each received a total of $22.6 million in federal grants in 2022 and 2023 for safe street corrections and speed reduction measures.

Brandon Campbell, director of transportation services for the City of Tampa Mobility Department, says the city is using its required $5 million matching funds to the first grant to enhance the safety of Twiggs Street downtown.

The $20 million is going to 17 projects over next three years to make high injury roads in the city safer with what’s called “quick build’’ improvements that reduce death and injuries, which can include mid-block crosswalks with blinking yellow warning beacons and painted bike lanes visually separated by plastic bollards.

The roads being addressed are spread across town and identified as a high injury network, Campbell says.

“Which means it’s about a quarter of our roadway miles that represents about three-quarters of our city in crashes. We know that those crashes tend to be concentrated on different kinds of facilities (roads), and we want to be systematic about how we deploy our safety improvements, but also to be strategic about where we start,’’ he says.

Among the city roads being improved by quick-build projects, Campbell says, are Habana Avenue; an area of Lake Avenue; Main Street; MacDill Avenue; Hanna Avenue and some stretches of 15th Street.

Other roads that have or are being improved, according to a city website, include Cass Street from North Boulevard to west of Tyler; 14th Street from Columbus Drive to Lake Avenue; Cleveland Street from west of Willow Avenue to Parker Street; 19^th Street from Durham Street to Adamo Drive; and Morgan Street from Brorein Street to Fortune Street.

“We have a few different tools that we implement for speed reduction. Sometimes, where it’s appropriate, we will narrow lanes so that they’re not big and wide open,’’ Campbell says. “People tend to see big, wide-open lanes and subconsciously treat it as more of an interstate type of facility. We want to design for the appropriate context. Sometimes we can put in raised crosswalks and those sorts of interventions as well, but it depends on the location.’’

While $20 million is a lot of money, Campbell says it’s not going to address all the needs of all the different corridors.
“We want to take the money as far as we can,” he says.

For more information and to register to attend Safe Streets Week events, go to planhillsborough.org/gcsss.