Rosangela Segundo-Osorio was a bubbly, enthusiastic first grader. She and her mother were using a marked crosswalk on Sheldon Road in Hillsborough County — doing exactly what they were supposed to do — when a driver killed her.
The girl was one of 618 walkers slain in the Tampa Bay area in five years.
They were killed by bad drivers, yes — but also by the roads we designed and the choices we keep making.
The Tampa Bay area ranked eighth-worst among the country’s 101 largest metro areas, according to the latest Dangerous by Design report, released late Tuesday by Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition. Florida had six cities in the top 20.
In some years, the number of walkers we kill in the Tampa Bay area rivals the number of murders. We wouldn’t tolerate a serial killer taking 125 lives a year. We’d demand action.
Instead, we build sidewalks to nowhere, if we build them at all. We design roads for speed. We treat transit like an infectious disease. And every year, more people die.
It’s 77-year-old Vicki Noon, who had a “wicked sense of humor” and “loved to laugh.” She was in her own Bradenton driveway collecting her mail when a driver hit her. The force blew her out of her shoes.
It’s 60-year-old Elbert Gilbert, 60, a jokester, good cook and the type of person who “always looked out for people and would give you the shirt off his back.” A driver killed him in a Clearwater crosswalk and drove away.
And it’s Rosangela.
The carnage isn’t inevitable. Just look at Oslo, Norway, which has more residents than Tampa and St. Petersburg combined. In 2019, the city reached zero pedestrian deaths. Helsinki, Finland, is also more populated than Tampa and St. Petersburg and had no pedestrian deaths. Over the last decade, Japan killed 30% fewer walkers, while Tampa Bay, Florida and the United States moved in the other direction.
Examples from closer to home also make us look inept, callous or both.
Tampa Bay kills walkers at twice the rate of Salt Lake City, Chicago or Milwaukee.
Three times more than Cincinnati, Buffalo or Cleveland.
Four times more than Pittsburgh, Boston or Madison, Wisconsin.
Five times more than Provo, Utah.
Five times!
We killed 618 pedestrians in five years, according to the report. The tally was 165 in Minneapolis, which has a larger population. The difference is glaring. No PhD in statistics needed.
Even Orlando, perennially among the most dangerous cities for walkers, improved enough to fall out of the top 20.
Those are American cities — big and small(ish), in red and blue states — that kill fewer pedestrians. What’s our excuse again?
Those cities have done the slow work that saves lives. They don’t think of pedestrian violence as the cost of a car-centric lifestyle. They have mustered the political will to make difficult choices, including installing speed cameras in some areas. They have nudged their culture toward safety. Their drivers look out for walkers, instead of treating them like nuisances, at least more than in Tampa Bay. The number of fatalities proves it.
They have designed safer roads, with narrower lanes, crosswalk curbs that jut into the roadway, speed humps, roundabouts, median landscaping and other upgrades, all proven to cue drivers to slow down. Making all those changes took time and a lot of political persuasion. But they did it. We’ve done some of that, too. But not enough.
Some places embrace innovation. Instead of bickering over what might happen based on drawings on an easel, they make quick, inexpensive changes. They literally road-test quick, do-it-yourself fixes.
Jersey City put in two makeshift traffic roundabouts for a week. After people saw how they worked rather than what they feared might happen, 72% of respondents supported making the traffic circles permanent. The city, across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan, has more residents than St. Petersburg but fewer than Tampa. In 2023, it had zero pedestrian deaths on city-controlled streets.
Zero is possible. Jersey City proved it. Oslo proved it.
The upgrades are good for drivers, too. No one wants to live with the nightmare of killing someone due to a poor road design.
Our roads encourage drivers “to go fast but to stop on a dime, in a way that is not physically possible,” said Beth Osborne, president and CEO of Smart Growth America. “And then we will blame you for that outcome, while we take more of your money to build more of the problem.”
We know how to fix this problem. The question is whether we choose to do so. We have to stop underfunding pedestrian infrastructure. Lane capacity cannot be the only measure of a road’s success. No more elected leaders nodding along with complete streets proposals without also shifting budget properties.
How many pedestrian deaths are acceptable? Apparently, we’ve decided 125 a year is fine.
It isn’t fine. It never was.
