Current Events > US-19 in Florida is the deadliest road in America

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.vox.com/23178764/florida-us19-deadliest-pedestrian-fatality-crisis

Drive along this part of US-19, a stretch of highway in Pasco County that parallels Floridas Gulf Coast, and youd be forgiven for not noticing the danger. It looks like a lot of American roads, especially in the South: flat, straight, and wide. Three lanes move in each direction, and extra turn lanes on the right and left bring the total number of lanes to eight or nine at most intersections. The road runs through several cities and places Hudson, Port Richey, New Port Richey, and Holiday but because of all the sprawl, you never really feel like youve left town.

Along the road is a panoply of American consumerism: Walmart, Publix, tattoo parlors, chain hotels, motels, 7-Elevens, multiple Dunkins, medical equipment stores, condemned buildings, strip clubs, auto body repair shops, oil change places, custom paint job businesses, chain restaurants, deserted property waiting to be redeveloped, and a mini-golf course where you can feed baby alligators, fenced in near the sidewalk.

Walk along this road, and you might begin to notice the danger. The speed limit is 45 to 55 miles per hour, but the cars are often going much faster. The crosswalks are so few and far between that a simple act crossing the street to get to a business a few hundred feet away might mean walking over half a mile to reach the nearest crosswalk. Even with sidewalks set back from the road, its clear that US-19 wasnt built for pedestrians.

Robert Schneider, a professor of urban planning at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, has never driven on this part of US-19. But amid a rise in pedestrian deaths across the country, Schneider and three of his colleagues Rebecca Sanders, Frank Proulx, and Hamideh Moayyed decided to look at the data on pedestrian deaths to try to find out where they were happening most frequently. Using information from the governments database of fatal car crashes, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, Schneider and his colleagues looked at all the pedestrian deaths recorded between 2001 and 2016. The idea was to identify hot spots: 1,000-meter segments of roadway where six or more pedestrians were killed over two eight-year periods. We thought: What can we find out about the places where these fatalities happened? Schneider says. There would likely be similarities, he assumed, which could point to potential safety improvements. One thing we wanted to shed light on is that they truly arent random.

They were expecting to find some overlap. But one road came up so many times that the results, Schneider says, were eye-popping. Out of the 60 hot spots they identified as having a high number of deaths, seven of them were on US-19 in Pasco County alone more than any other road in the United States. When you add the numbers up, thats 137 pedestrian fatalities over the entire Pasco County. Thats an incredibly high number, Schneider says. If an airplane crashed there and 137 people died, people would know about it, he says.

The study looked at deaths through 2016 the most recent year finalized data was available. But a Vox analysis of open-source data from the Florida Department of Transportation showed that pedestrian fatalities have continued to be a problem: 48 people have been killed in car crashes that involved pedestrians on US-19 in Pasco County between 2017 and June 2022.

For every 100 miles on US-19, there have been at least 34 deaths since 2017, making it the deadliest road across the state.

Locals might not have the statistics at their fingertips, but they know that US-19 is dangerous. In 2020, 13 people traveling US-19 by car in Pasco County were killed in crashes. For residents who rely on it, US-19 is both mundane and maddeningly treacherous. Crashes are so ubiquitous that some talk about an old bumper sticker on cars that read: Pray for me, I drive on US-19. Another part of US-19, in neighboring Pinellas County, is sometimes called death valley. But the road is pretty much unavoidable for most people trying to move freely through the area, and the alternatives arent much better. No one is more endangered on the road than those who use it unprotected by a ton of steel and there are a lot of them.

The rest of the article goes on for a long while about America's transportation infrastructure and why it's so uniquely dangerous. Suffice to say: not great!

Obama's US-19

and a mini-golf course where you can feed baby alligators, fenced in near the sidewalk.

*high pitched squealing*

I want to ask which is less likely

Smart cars
or
Roads built for locals/pedestrians

?

If we spent more money on road building for locals, the materials would be more varied and cheaper.

Imagine a Taco Bell on the side of US-19 with a pit bull loose in the parking lot.

so are the pedestrians jaywalking or getting hit in crosswalks? I feel like that's important info they left out. I'd never try to cross a busy 45-55mph street outside of a crosswalker

divot1338 posted...

*high pitched squealing*

Yeah, that's the alligators. They sound like laser blasters lmao

I thought this was about this road
https://youtu.be/d6tgmGqXysM

thronedfire2 posted...

so are the pedestrians jaywalking or getting hit in crosswalks? I feel like that's important info they left out. I'd never try to cross a busy 45-55mph street outside of a crosswalker

It's not the pedestrians fault at all, the road is poorly designed like all stroads.

https://youtu.be/ORzNZUeUHAM

thronedfire2 posted...

so are the pedestrians jaywalking or getting hit in crosswalks? I feel like that's important info they left out. I'd never try to cross a busy 45-55mph street outside of a crosswalker

The article makes two points on this front:

The crosswalks are so far apart its easy to see why some people decide to make a run for it. After Main Street, we dont see another crosswalk until Grand Boulevard in Port Richey 1.7 miles away. That means someone looking to get across the street between the two might need to walk an extra mile or more to find a safe crossing.
...
That instinct, to attribute a fatal crash to some failure of personal responsibility, distracts us from the bigger picture: that many of our road designs are inherently unsafe. Jessie Singer, author of the book There Are No Accidents, says that the things we think of as accidents are in fact the result of dangerous conditions in our built environments.

We focus on individual blame, Singer says, because that makes it easier for us to believe that it couldnt happen to us. Plus, it prevents us from having to make the hard structural changes necessary to prevent crashes from happening again: to call them accidents makes them seem at once inevitable and impossible to change. This narrative kind of lets the government and corporations off the hook from having to protect us, Singer says.

If accidents are supposed to be random, Singer says, then accidental death would be evenly distributed across the country but its not. Schneiders study showed that pedestrian deaths arent random, either. The places with the most pedestrian deaths tend to look like US-19 in one way or another: high-speed, with multiple lanes, and lots of commercial and residential development around them. Three-quarters of them are bordered by low-income areas, where people may be less likely to have access to a car.

thronedfire2 posted...

so are the pedestrians jaywalking or getting hit in crosswalks? I feel like that's important info they left out. I'd never try to cross a busy 45-55mph street outside of a crosswalker

If crosswalks can be a half mike walk to get to, Id definitely expect there to be some jaywalking. But even crosswalks wouldnt be safe.

yeah if the intersections are 1.7 miles apart they need to build pedestrian bridges or something if they don't want to add extra lights for crosswalks

That's dumb as shit why is it like that

They could make a couple bridges over the road in the areas where people are dying the most...right?

Smackems posted...

That's dumb as shit why is it like that

The article:

Its a fundamental conflict, one that plagues communities like New Port Richey all over the country. State transportation departments, Dumbaugh, the urban planning professor, says, designed arterial roads to be high-speed and efficient ways of carrying lots of traffic. Land developers then built up property around the roads. Once that happens, Dumbaugh says, youve put together a few things that are fundamentally incompatible. Add more housing to the mix and youve got a situation where people are walking, Dumbaugh says, in environments that were never designed to accommodate it.
...
Traffic engineers typical response to high congestion is to create more lanes for more traffic, Marohn says, which only makes the problem worse. Studies have shown that more lanes tend to create more traffic, which means that building out stroads usually results in the same amount of gridlock. What happens when engineers widen roads and create clear zones, Marohn says, is that drivers respond to those cues. It tells drivers, weve got your back, and the way that drivers respond to that is by shutting off the active part of their brains, he says.

You're pretty patient with people like me that didn't read the article lol

I don't expect people to read that thing, just figured I'd help answer the question.

Basically, the entire transportation system was set up for cars and only cars to "go go go" because this is a car supremacist culture.

Then they also built up suburbia and endless shopping because capitalism. Which requires stopping and walking.

No thought was put into how these things would work together and there was no pro-pedestrian contingency with any ability to point out the obvious contradictions.

Leading to death. Sounds pretty familiar.

My grandmother lives in Holiday and only like a five minute walk to this road. I survived Highway 19 is on shirts and stickers around there.

Doesn't help that Floridians are the worst drivers in the country. The perfect mix of aggressive thrill seekers and slow retirees to create dangerous situations.

Proto_Spark posted...

I thought this was about this road
https://youtu.be/d6tgmGqXysM

I so want to drive the Tail of the Dragon one day, but I'd rather do it when no one else is on it because honestly, other drivers are the main hazard when driving.