JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Florida remains in the top 10 states for pedestrian deaths, and the Florida Department of Transportation is making an effort to prevent more people from being fatally hit on the roadways.
San Jose Boulevard is a busy street in Jacksonville with walkers and bicyclists trying to make their way around.
Joseph McKnight Jr. uses the street almost weekly. He said walking San Jose is okay but other streets don’t give him as much confidence.
“I don’t feel good. They hit corners. It’s rough,” McKnight said.
A man who goes by the name County said his wife has been hit twice on the busy street. Luckily, she survived, but that wasn’t the case for 56-year-old Esther Ohayon who was killed while crossing San Jose at Haley Road in 2013.
She was on her way to Yom Kippur services with her daughter. Her daughter was severely injured but survived.
Ohayon, for religious reasons, did not push the crosswalk button to extend the light before crossing. FDOT installed an infrared signal detection to help after her death.
“What we have done here is we’ve implemented infrared systems to help pedestrians by identifying and turning the signal to a walk signal,” Hampton Ray with FDOT said.
Ray explained how the system works:
“If you fail to touch the button, it will identify that you are a person looking to cross the road. So, we just walk over here. Once we walk into this zone pad that’s here, this is where you would stand if you’re visually impaired. You would identify the pedestrian signal there and then it just turned from green to red. So, it identifies that we are here,” Ray said.
Now someone can safely cross the street.
A Jacksonville man died in February after a car went airborne and crashed into a pedestrian bridge in St. Johns County. In the first 206 days of 2023, 100 people were killed in traffic crashes in Jacksonville.
Mayor Donna Deegan mentioned pedestrian deaths at a news conference for the Emerald Trial.
“It will be safer for pedestrians, too. We must close the chapter on being a top 10 city for pedestrian fatalities year after year,” she said.
Other improvements have also been put in place. The Florida state legislature requires a bike path to be constructed for all new roads.
FDOT has a program that is a statewide initiative called Target Zero. State funds help prioritize safety and ultimately bring down deaths on state roads to zero.
Click here to visit a website that shows you pedestrian death data by county.