Jacksonville remains one of country's most dangerous cities for pedestrians, study says

Jacksonville remains one of America’s most dangerous communities for pedestrians, according to a report released Tuesday by a national group promoting changes in street design.

The city’s metropolitan area ranked fourth-worst nationally, a slight improvement from its No. 3 standing in a 2014 report from the National Complete Streets Coalition, an organization that includes AARP and the planning group Smart Growth America.

Despite that relative improvement, metropolitan Jacksonville’s score on a “pedestrian danger index” grew worse by a wider margin since 2014 than any community the report ranked.

Florida had eight of the 10 most dangerous metro areas for pedestrians, the streets coalition said.

The report said Florida has been the most dangerous place for walking for four successive reports, but said the state’s Florida’s Department of Transportation has taken steps to improve its road designs.

“We certainly are seeing that we do have a big problem with pedestrian safety … and accept that,” said Trenda McPherson, who manages the state’s bicycle/pedestrian safety program.

Titled Dangerous by Design, the report argued deaths can be reduced by changing street designs to improve attention to pedestrian safety. It said senior citizens and people who aren’t white are statistically more likely to be killed in pedestrian accidents, and notes those parts of the population are growing.

“So long as streets are built to prioritize high speeds at the cost of pedestrian safety, this will remain a problem,” the report said.

Jacksonville is working on its problems but has needed time to find solutions, one transportation official said.

“The reality is that things are happening. But you don’t change this from day to night,” said Elizabeth De Jesus, a transportation programs manager at the North Florida Transportation Planning Organization.

Jacksonville planners have been trying to develop a master plan for improving bicycle and pedestrian travel in areas fitting roughly inside Interstate 295’s loop around the city.

A consultant’s memo drafted last month described “a systemic, citywide traffic safety problem with 15,000-18,000 injury-producing motor vehicle collisions every year” and “a significant absence of basic pedestrian infrastructure” such as sidewalks and crosswalks.

The draft identified a series of prioritized bike projects, some of which might be funded through part of a city “mobility fee” assessed on new developments.

Separately, De Jesus’s agency recently began a project aimed at improving safety through carefully targeted public outreach measures. That effort could take two years and is in early research stages, she said.

The Complete Streets report ranked the Cape Coral-Fort Myers area as the country’s most dangerous place for pedestrians, followed by Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville and Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford.

That ranking uses a danger index that scores communities based on pedestrian deaths between 2005 and 2014 — around Jacksonville, there were 379 — and the proportion of area residents who walk to work. A higher index score means a greater risk.

Complete Streets has used years-long fatality counts like that to compare conditions in 2011, 2014 and 2016.

The Jacksonville area’s score increased repeatedly by that measure, rising from 177.8 in 2011 to 228.7 last year. Florida’s statewide index number rose 8.4 point in that time, to a 2016 score of 177.

Although nationally non-whites were at greater risk, for Florida the report showed only a 1 percent increase in relative risk.

Steve Patterson: (904) 359-4263