Residents and St. Cloud city staff members heard a presentation from a Florida Department of Transportation team on planned U.S. Highway 192/13th Street pedestrian safety improvements.
The project location is between Florida and Michigan Avenues, and the improvements include new traffic signals at the Florida and Indiana Avenue intersections, and replacing the signal at Michigan.
Project Manager Kevin Powell emphasized the new signals will only be activated when pedestrians are trying to cross. At all other times, those signals will not cycle or affect the flow of traffic.
In addition to the new traffic signals, all three intersections will be reconstructed into a new directional median configuration. The result will be a single diagonal pedestrian crosswalk.
According to the FDOT team, the new intersection configuration and signals will have several significant benefits. First, potential conflict points or areas where vehicles could potentially cross paths and collide are significantly reduced. Chances for right-angle or T‐bone crashes are also reduced.
Since pedestrians will cross the main roadway diagonally, they will be out of the path of vehicles turning right from side streets onto U.S. 192/13th Street. There is also the potential that signalization and median configuration will allow vehicles to make left turns from U.S. 192 onto side streets while protecting pedestrians in the crosswalk.
The project is the result of a safety study completed in 2020 after a pedestrian fatality in that vicinity in 2019. A school crossing guard was struck by a vehicle running a red light in 2020 at the Michigan Avenue intersection as well, and the area has also seen its share of bicycle-vs.-vehicle incidents in recent years.
The road section covered in the project sees many crossings by students from St. Cloud Elementary, St. Cloud High School, and Lakeview Elementary.
The Michigan Avenue improvements will also bring the intersection into compliance with updated Americans with Disabilities Acts standards.
The project will cost a total of approximately $2.5 million for design and construction and is slated to start in the spring of 2023. All project funding is being provided by the Florida Department of Transportation.
All meeting materials, including the presentation, are available on the project website at www.cflroads. com/project/445709-1.
