More than a hundred people stood in silence earlier this month outside Bradley’s on 7th, an Ybor City LGBTQ+ bar that, hours earlier, had been the site of a deadly car crash that killed four bystanders and injured 13 others.
As they hugged and cried, a voice rang above the crowd.
“We’re concerned about pedestrian safety,” yelled Taylor Aguilera, who frequents the bar. Many cheered. Others turned to listen.
“Every major city in America shuts down big pedestrian intersections like this at nighttime,” she said. “We need action.”
Calls for change soon flooded social media, mixed in among messages sharing condolences and confusion, anger and grief.
Advocates urged the city to close Seventh Avenue to traffic on busy weekend nights, in what would be a return to a 1990s policy intended to calm tangles of crowds and cars.
City leaders say they have no plans to shut the street again and that the crash was an isolated incident. Closing the street could cause unintended consequences, they say.
But Aguilera said the city can do more to protect pedestrians and prevent fatal traffic incidents.
“When we come out to Ybor for the night,” Aguilera wrote on Facebook, “we expect to go home at the end of the night.”
Calls for closure
Shirley Gadis Brookins cried as she stood before Tampa City Council members at City Hall on Nov. 13. She said her cousin, 53-year-old Sherman Jones, was killed in the Ybor City crash days earlier.
“If you all could just put up barricades and cruisers, so there is no way that people can just fly through and hurt other people and their family members —” she paused, sniffling. “It’s not fair.”
Retractable bollards — vertical posts that can be raised and lowered from the ground to block or allow traffic — are one of the suggestions for Seventh Avenue. Advocates have also floated traffic-calming measures such as speed humps, narrow driving lanes and raised curbs.
“At the core of this is the interaction between a driver, with a several thousand-pound vehicle, and pedestrians, with no protection,” said Ruth Steiner, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Florida, in a phone call Nov. 17. “As a vulnerable road user, (pedestrians) are more likely to be on the losing end of any collision with a vehicle,” she added in an email.
Steiner said it’s important to consider the unintended consequences of closing the street to traffic. “Where does the traffic go?” she said. “Does it displace the problem to another place nearby?”
Measures such as painted pavement and tree-lined streets can be effective at slowing drivers, she said, but “that may not address acts of aggressive driving.”
Advocates of the closure say other cities have made similar changes in recent years.
In Nashville, sections of bar-lined Broadway close on some weekend nights and during special events. Police in 2021 said the move reduced arrests and promoted safety. And New Orleans recently updated its bollard system on Bourbon Street, where a truck attack earlier this year killed more than a dozen people.
Trevor Rosine, president of the Tampa chapter of the nonprofit PFLAG, which advocates for LGBTQ+ people, urged City Council members to host a community input session focused on pedestrian safety in Ybor City. After that, Rosine said, the city could “consider a timed or pilot closure” of the street during high-traffic hours to evaluate the effect.
“I’m not asking you to close Seventh Avenue today,” said Rosine, who grew up in the neighborhood. “I’m asking you to start a community-driven process.”
Deadly for pedestrians
Rosine said the crash on Seventh Avenue is part of a broader question of pedestrian safety citywide.
On Nov. 13, Rosine told City Council members that Hoboken, New Jersey, and Helsinki, Finland, haven’t seen traffic deaths in more than a year. Both cities follow Vision Zero, a plan to eliminate traffic fatalities and severe injuries in cities around the world.
Under Mayor Jane Castor, Tampa adopted Vision Zero principles in 2019 and committed to prioritizing the city streets’ most vulnerable users: bikers and walkers, the old and the young. According to a 2023 report, that meant analyzing past crash trends, lowering speed limits, and adding pavement markings and signs to certain streets.
But fatalities remained high. A 2024 Dangerous by Design report ranked the Tampa Bay area the eighth-worst metro area for pedestrian deaths nationwide. A Tampa Bay Times analysis earlier this year found the region could be doing more to make streets safer for pedestrians. According to the city’s crash dashboard, more than 115 pedestrians have died and more than 220 have been seriously injured in vehicle crashes in the last five years.
“It feels like a pedestrian-related crash was inevitable at this point,” Ybor City resident Angel D’Angelo said of Seventh Avenue in a phone call Nov. 14. “If it’s not a speed race or running from the police, what if it’s a drunk driver? Somebody who’s texting and driving and flies onto the sidewalk?”
Questions of safety in Ybor City
Seventh Avenue has long been at the center of debates around public safety in Tampa.
Lined with restaurants and nightclubs, the brick street grows crowded with late-night revelers on weekends. In 2023, a fatal shooting on the street pushed the city to consider enforcing a juvenile curfew.
Three decades ago, to reduce congestion, the city blocked Seventh Avenue to traffic on Friday and Saturday nights.
“Anytime you mix crowds, youth and alcohol, you get potential for trouble,” said Maj. K.C. Newcomb of the Tampa Police Department at a 2002 City Council meeting. “And when you throw in traffic, the difficulties far outweigh the benefits from a public safety perspective.”
But the street soon became “a party,” crawling with underage people and littered with pamphlets advertising drink specials, according to a 2020 presentation from the Ybor City Development Corp. Residents and business owners complained about noise.
In 2005, under Mayor Pam Iorio, Tampa reopened the street to traffic.
City leaders respond
Despite the community push, many city leaders say they plan to keep the street open.
Police Chief Lee Bercaw said in an emailed statement that closed streets can cause crowds to form, “creating more challenging and unsafe conditions for everyone.”
At a news conference in November, Castor agreed.
Allowing traffic gives police and other public safety workers better access during emergencies, she said. It also “prevents the congregation of individuals that are coming with no intent to patronize the establishments, the restaurants or other entertainment venues,” Castor said. “Many come with bad intent, and we’ve seen the results of that in the past.”
Tampa City Council member Bill Carlson pointed to the 2023 shooting on Seventh Avenue, which led to the deaths of a 14-year-old and a 20-year-old.
“I remember in the ’90s when there was a lot of fighting among underage people,” Carlson said in a phone call Nov. 14. “And the incident two years ago happened with underage people who didn’t go to the bars, and came because the road was closed.”
For Tampa City Council chairperson Alan Clendenin, “we have to be careful about reacting to a one-off, because if we react in a disproportionate way to what happened in one particular location, we neglect to see the larger picture.”
Clendenin said traffic-control measures like bollards are effective at slow speeds but may not have prevented the Ybor City crash. The car reached speeds from 92 to 100 mph seconds before plowing into the crowd, according to court records.
The city is proactive about safety, Clendenin said in a phone call, but “there’s not enough time and there’s not enough money in the world to eliminate every risk.”