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Health & Fitness

The Safety Dance

While Tampa pretends to dance with safety, pedestrians and bicyclists are more likely to be struck by a car here than in nearly any other major US metro area.

While Tampa pretends to dance with safety, pedestrians and bicyclists are more likely to be struck by a car here than in nearly any other major US metro area. Tampa is second in the nation for having the worst pedestrian safety and number of deaths (Orlando is first). Florida leads the nation in bicycle fatalities with 11 of them in Hillsborough County in 2010.  

Where are most of the pedestrain fatalities? According to Transportation for America, which reports these figures annually, they occur on "streets engineered for speeding traffic with little or no provision for people on foot, in wheelchairs or on bicycles."

Does that sound like maybe your street or most of the streets in Seminole Heights? The large majority of streets in Seminole Heights have no sidewalks.Our open grid pattern and proximity to several busy highways (Nebraska, Hillsborough, Florida, Tampa, MLK) along with the freeway encourage large amounts of cut-through traffic.

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If pedestrian safety was a top city priority, we would be having debates on ways to install more sidewalks, calm traffic, and make Tampa a safe place to walk and bike. Instead, we are worried most about panhandling as a "safety issue" and we continue to do the safety dance, taking a chance, side-by-side with cars on the street.

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