Roads may get lower speed limits

State stresses pedestrian safety

Get your foot off the gas: Florida is thinking about reducing speed limits from an average of 45 mph to 25 mph in some areas.

It’s part of an ambitious plan to make the state’s roads and highways safer for people on foot and bicycles.

Which roads will get slower? It’s too soon to say. The Florida Department of Transportation is considering a number of measures that could show up over several years.

They are part of the “Complete Streets” initiative adopted by FDOT in 2014 and tailored by individual counties, cities and towns.

Other plans include narrowing streets,

improving transit connections and adding dedicated bicycle lanes, traffic circles, wider sidewalks and obstacles to deter jaywalking.

But, speed is seen as one of the main causes of pedestrian injury and death.

According to a national study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, 90 percent of pedestrians hit by a car going nearly 60 mph died. Fifty percent were killed when struck at about 40 mph, but only 10 percent died when hit by cars going nearly 25 mph. If you double the speed of a car, you increase its force of impact four times. If you triple the speed, the impact is nine times as great, according to the Florida Drivers Handbook.

In a similar effort, Fort Lauderdale was the first city in Florida to join the nationwide Vision Zero plan, which also employs things like bike lanes, wider sidewalks and slower speeds in an attempt to eliminate pedestrian deaths.

So far this year, through the end of July, Fort Lauderdale police reported that 106 pedestrians were hit by vehicles, with eight fatalities. Seventy bicycle collisions have occurred, but no one has died, according to Florida’s Integrated Report Exchange System, a database of crash statistics.

Since 1996, the Florida Legislature authorized speed limits of 70 mph on Interstates, 65 mph on fourlane divided highways outside urban areas and 55 to 60 mph on narrower state highways such as two-lane, undivided rural roads.

The speed limits on most city, commercial and residential streets is 30 mph. School zones are 15 to 20 mph.

An effort to increase Interstate speed limits to 75 mph was vetoed by Gov. Rick Scott in 2014.