More than a hundred people stood in silence earlier this month outside Bradley\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
As they hugged and cried, a voice rang above the crowd.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re concerned about pedestrian safety,\u201d yelled Taylor Aguilera, who frequents the bar. Many cheered. Others turned to listen.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery major city in America shuts down big pedestrian intersections like this at nighttime,\u201d she said. \u201cWe need action.\u201d<\/p>\n
Calls for change soon flooded social media, mixed in among messages sharing condolences and confusion, anger and grief.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But Aguilera said the city can do more to protect pedestrians and prevent fatal traffic incidents.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we come out to Ybor for the night,\u201d Aguilera wrote on Facebook, \u201cwe expect to go home at the end of the night.\u201d<\/p>\n
Calls for closure<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf 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 \u2014” she paused, sniffling. \u201cIt\u2019s not fair.\u201d<\/p>\n
Retractable bollards \u2014 vertical posts that can be raised and lowered from the ground to block or allow traffic \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the core of this is the interaction between a driver, with a several thousand-pound vehicle, and pedestrians, with no protection,\u201d said Ruth Steiner, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Florida, in a phone call Nov. 17. \u201cAs a vulnerable road user, (pedestrians) are more likely to be on the losing end of any collision with a vehicle,\u201d she added in an email.<\/p>\n
Steiner said it\u2019s important to consider the unintended consequences of closing the street to traffic. \u201cWhere does the traffic go?\u201d she said. \u201cDoes it displace the problem to another place nearby?\u201d<\/p>\n
Measures such as painted pavement and tree-lined streets can be effective at slowing drivers, she said, but \u201cthat may not address acts of aggressive driving.\u201d<\/p>\n
Advocates of the closure say other cities have made similar changes in recent years.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cconsider a timed or pilot closure\u201d of the street during high-traffic hours to evaluate the effect.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not asking you to close Seventh Avenue today,\u201d said Rosine, who grew up in the neighborhood. \u201cI\u2019m asking you to start a community-driven process.\u201d<\/p>\n
Deadly for pedestrians<\/p>\n
Rosine said the crash on Seventh Avenue is part of a broader question of pedestrian safety citywide.<\/p>\n
On Nov. 13, Rosine told City Council members that Hoboken, New Jersey, and Helsinki, Finland, haven\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Under Mayor Jane Castor, Tampa adopted Vision Zero principles in 2019 and committed to prioritizing the city streets\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s crash dashboard, more than 115 pedestrians have died and more than 220 have been seriously injured in vehicle crashes in the last five years.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt feels like a pedestrian-related crash was inevitable at this point,\u201d Ybor City resident Angel D\u2019Angelo said of Seventh Avenue in a phone call Nov. 14. \u201cIf it\u2019s not a speed race or running from the police, what if it\u2019s a drunk driver? Somebody who\u2019s texting and driving and flies onto the sidewalk?\u201d<\/p>\n
Questions of safety in Ybor City<\/p>\n
Seventh Avenue has long been at the center of debates around public safety in Tampa.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Three decades ago, to reduce congestion, the city blocked Seventh Avenue to traffic on Friday and Saturday nights.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnytime you mix crowds, youth and alcohol, you get potential for trouble,\u201d said Maj. K.C. Newcomb of the Tampa Police Department at a 2002 City Council meeting. \u201cAnd when you throw in traffic, the difficulties far outweigh the benefits from a public safety perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the street soon became \u201ca party,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
In 2005, under Mayor Pam Iorio, Tampa reopened the street to traffic.<\/p>\n
City leaders respond<\/p>\n
Despite the community push, many city leaders say they plan to keep the street open.<\/p>\n
Police Chief Lee Bercaw said in an emailed statement that closed streets can cause crowds to form, \u201ccreating more challenging and unsafe conditions for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n
At a news conference in November, Castor agreed.<\/p>\n
Allowing traffic gives police and other public safety workers better access during emergencies, she said. It also \u201cprevents the congregation of individuals that are coming with no intent to patronize the establishments, the restaurants or other entertainment venues,\u201d Castor said. \u201cMany come with bad intent, and we\u2019ve seen the results of that in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember in the \u201990s when there was a lot of fighting among underage people,\u201d Carlson said in a phone call Nov. 14. \u201cAnd the incident two years ago happened with underage people who didn\u2019t go to the bars, and came because the road was closed.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Tampa City Council chairperson Alan Clendenin, \u201cwe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The city is proactive about safety, Clendenin said in a phone call, but \u201cthere\u2019s not enough time and there\u2019s not enough money in the world to eliminate every risk.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than a hundred people stood in silence earlier this month outside Bradley\u2019s on 7th, an Ybor City…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57866,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[1776,28,276,9198,6562,35522,12783,35519,9201,5212,728,135,610,137,136,729,35518,25994,8848,35521,15925,35520,35517,10364],"class_list":["post-57865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-crash","tag-florida","tag-hillsborough-county","tag-land-transport","tag-pedestrian","tag-road-infrastructure","tag-road-safety","tag-road-traffic-safety","tag-road-transport","tag-sidewalk","tag-street","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-city-council","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news","tag-traffic","tag-traffic-calming","tag-traffic-collision","tag-transport","tag-transport-infrastructure","tag-transport-safety","tag-vision-zero","tag-ybor-city-lgbtq","tag-ybor-city"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57865\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}