US road design favors speed over pedestrian safety.

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Most American roads aren’t just unpleasant for pedestrians, they can be dangerous. Pedestrian fatalities have been rising in the past few years, and urban planners point to the way roads are designed as the culprit.

A group of urban planners identified 60 pedestrian fatality hot spots throughout the US, and a 1,000meter corridor of US19 in New Port Richey, Florida, topped their list. Seventeen pedestrians lost their lives along this short stretch of road in the study period of 2001 to 2016.

The fatality hot spots on the study’s list shared a lot of design characteristics. Many of them are arterial thoroughfares: roads historically built to keep highspeed traffic off of nearby residential streets. But the way US communities developed in a sprawling fashion along these roads meant these roadways also became business centers that pedestrians might need to access. The number of lanes and distances between crosswalks are among other dangerous design elements.

For this video, we went to New Port Richey to walk along US19 and document the design characteristics identified in the study.


Correction A previous version of this video featured an interview that spoke to a memorial at Main Street and US19. Locals from the New Port Richey area brought to our attention that the interview misrepresented the memorial, which honors a young man who was killed during an accident between two cars, not a bicycle as stated in the interview. Our sincere apologies for including the misrepresentation of the victim's story. We have edited the video to correct that error.

This is a link to a GoFundMe for the victim's family which includes more details about the incident: https://www.gofundme.com/f/qe5jkzfun...


This video is an adaptation of Vox.com reporter Marin Cogan’s investigation of US19:
https://www.vox.com/23178764/florida...

Local journalists have credited Marin’s reporting for pressuring local officials to follow through on planned improvements to US19:
https://www.tampabay.com/news/pasco/2...

The pedestrian fatality study this story is based on is below:
https://www.jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu/a...

A source for this story was Eric Dumbaugh, who authored a study on arterial roads:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/...

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