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He didn’t have a car and he liked to walk, so the 33-year-old traveled it often, to visit friends and to move between his extended family’s houses. Julie’s brother, Kevin Bodiford, knew US-19 well. “This road has so many cars,” says Julie Bodiford, a nurse who lives in the area, “and it’s death after death.” No one is more endangered on the road than those who use it unprotected by a ton of steel - and there are a lot of them. Crashes are so ubiquitous that some talk about an old bumper sticker on cars that read: “Pray for me, I drive on US-19.” Another part of US-19, in neighboring Pinellas County, is sometimes called “death valley.” But the road is pretty much unavoidable for most people trying to move freely through the area, and the alternatives aren’t much better. For residents who rely on it, US-19 is both mundane and maddeningly treacherous. In 2020, 13 people traveling US-19 by car in Pasco County were killed in crashes. Locals might not have the statistics at their fingertips, but they know that US-19 is dangerous.

Youyou Zhou/Voxįor every 100 miles on US-19, there have been at least 34 deaths since 2017, making it the deadliest road across the state. But a Vox analysis of open-source data from the Florida Department of Transportation showed that pedestrian fatalities have continued to be a problem: 48 people have been killed in car crashes that involved pedestrians on US-19 in Pasco County between 2017 and June 2022. The study looked at deaths through 2016 - the most recent year finalized data was available. “If an airplane crashed there and 137 people died, people would know about it,” he says. That’s an incredibly high number,” Schneider says. “When you add the numbers up, that’s 137 pedestrian fatalities over the entire Pasco County. But one road came up so many times that the results, Schneider says, were “eye-popping.” 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. They were expecting to find some overlap. “One thing we wanted to shed light on is that they truly aren’t random.” There would likely be similarities, he assumed, which could point to potential safety improvements. “We thought: What can we find out about the places where these fatalities happened?” Schneider says. The idea was to identify hot spots: 1,000-meter segments of roadway where six or more pedestrians were killed over two eight-year periods. Using information from the government’s database of fatal car crashes, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, Schneider and his colleagues looked at all the pedestrian deaths recorded between 20. But amid a rise in pedestrian deaths across the country, Schneider and three of his colleagues - Rebecca Sanders, Frank Proulx, and Hamideh Moayyed - decided to look at the data on pedestrian deaths to try to find out where they were happening most frequently. Robert Schneider, a professor of urban planning at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, has never driven on this part of US-19. Retailers line US-19 north of Green Key Road in New Port Richey. Even with sidewalks set back from the road, it’s clear that US-19 wasn’t built for pedestrians. The crosswalks are so few and far between that a simple act - crossing the street to get to a business a few hundred feet away - might mean walking over half a mile to reach the nearest crosswalk. The speed limit is 45 to 55 miles per hour, but the cars are often going much faster. Walk along this road, and you might begin to notice the danger. The road runs through several cities and places - Hudson, Port Richey, New Port Richey, and Holiday - but because of all the sprawl, you never really feel like you’ve left town.Īlong the road is a panoply of American consumerism: Walmart, Publix, tattoo parlors, chain hotels, motels, 7-Elevens, multiple Dunkin’s, medical equipment stores, condemned buildings, strip clubs, auto body repair shops, oil change places, custom paint job businesses, chain restaurants, deserted property waiting to be redeveloped, and a mini-golf course where you can feed baby alligators, fenced in near the sidewalk. Three lanes move in each direction, and extra turn lanes on the right and left bring the total number of lanes to eight or nine at most intersections. It looks like a lot of American roads, especially in the South: flat, straight, and wide. Part of the July 2022 issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.ĭrive along this part of US-19, a stretch of highway in Pasco County that parallels Florida’s Gulf Coast, and you’d be forgiven for not noticing the danger.