The Deadliest Stroad in America
US-19 in Florida, highlighted in red. (Source: Wikipedia.)
Just to the north and west of Tampa, Florida, US-19 runs along the Gulf of Mexico, eight or nine lanes of pure American stroad. It connects suburban towns with an uninterrupted smorgasbord of chain stores, parking lots, and entrances to residential neighborhoods dominated by single-family homes.
Even though it’s a long way from the California desert, this roadway controlled by the Florida Department of Transportation is known to locals as “death valley.” A recent VOX article by Marin Cogan, “The Deadliest Road in America,” lays out the reasons why. Cogan’s piece, shared widely by Strong Towns allies, seamlessly weaves a heartbreaking tale of one woman’s loss of her brother on US-19 with a safety design critique of high-speed arterials.
Central to Cogan’s article is a 2021 report in the Journal of Transportation and Land Use which looks at deadly “hot spots” involving cars and people on foot in America. The report correlates those crashes to roadway design features and land use in two periods from 2001 to 2008 and from 2009 to 2016. Hot spots listed in the JTLU report were defined as 1,000-meter segments of roadway where six or more walkers were killed by vehicles over the two eight-year periods.
Out of the 60 hot spots they identified as having a high number of deaths, seven of them were on US-19 in Pasco County alone—more than any other road in the United States, Cogan wrote.
Fatal pedestrian crashes in Florida from 2017 to 2022. (Click to enlarge. Source: VOX.)
“The places with the most pedestrian deaths tend to look like US-19 in one way or another: high-speed, with multiple lanes, and lots of commercial and residential development around them,” Cogan wrote. “Three-quarters of them are bordered by low-income areas, where people may be less likely to have access to a car. They are in places as diverse as Langley Park, Maryland; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Manhattan, New York; and Los Angeles, California. They’re places where pedestrians are forced to cross roads that are dangerous by design, alongside trucks and SUVs that are getting bigger and deadlier all the time.”
Another 48 people have been killed in car crashes that involved pedestrians on US-19 in Pasco County between 2017 and June 2022, according to Cogan’s article. It’s no surprise to anyone at Strong Towns—especially its president and founder, Chuck Marohn—that most of the hot spots in the JTLU report are on stroads.
“‘Stroads are really deadly,’” Marohn told Cogan for her VOX piece. “And US-19, with its high speeds, multiple lanes, cars turning on and off — and people walking, biking, and using wheelchairs — is kind of like a stroad on steroids. ‘This is literally the deadliest design that we could come up with.’”
Non-freeway arterial roads, stroads, which typically carry large volumes of traffic at high speeds, are the most dangerous for people on foot, accounting for 60% of all fatalities in 2020, according to a May 2022 report by the Governors Highway Safety Association.
Roads are supposed to move people as quickly as possible from one location to another. Streets are places, where people live, shop, eat, and play. Because streets are highly developed on either side, vehicle traffic needs to be slow, to accommodate people outside of cars.
A stroad, Marohn told Cogan, is the worst of both worlds. “‘If you think of a futon that’s trying to be both a couch and a bed and does neither of them well — that’s a stroad. A stroad tries to be both a street and a road at the same time, and it underperforms at both,” he said.
An intersection of US-19 in New Port Richey, FL. (Source: VOX.)
Stroads are highly congested, with drivers stuck in stop-and-go traffic and turning across several lanes, and the potential for collisions increasing exponentially.
Marohn explained pedestrian fatalities surged across the country during the pandemic, especially on stroads, because congestion is actually one of the few things that can force cars to slow down. When congestion was removed during the pandemic by a reduction in driving, especially during peak driving times, fatalities went up.
“The congestion has in a sense been covering up our deadly designs,” Marohn told Cogan. “What the pandemic did is reveal how deadly our design approach is.”
The fix is for local communities, not traffic engineers, to decide what they want a given road or street to be, and then to focus on meeting those goals, essentially deprogramming stroads so that they’re either streets or roads. It would mean slowing traffic way down to keep cars from moving through streets too quickly, or removing businesses’ driveway access to stroads and keeping pedestrians far from the road so they can become safe for high-speed travel.
Jay Stange is an experienced community development consultant, journalist, grassroots organizer, musician, teacher, and off-grid project manager. Raised in Alaska, his passions include transforming transportation systems and making it easier to live closer to where we work, play, and do our daily rounds. Find him shopping for groceries on his cargo bike, gardening, and coaching soccer in West Hartford, Connecticut, where he lives with his family. You can connect with him on Twitter at @corvidity.