Best Foot Forward teams with police to educate drivers with school starting in 2 weeks
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A pedestrian — a plain-clothes St. Cloud Police officer — crosses 10th Street at Michigan Avenue during Monday's Best Foot Forward outreach campaign. This motorist properly stopped. PHOTO/KEN JACKSON -
St. Cloud Police officers pulled over drivers who didn't properly yield for cross-walking pedestrians during Monday's enforcement campaign. PHOTO/KEN JACKSON
It may be a little early to talk about kids heading — and walking — back to school, but it’s never a bad time to talk about and illustrate pedestrian safety.
Best Foot Forward, a coalition of regional partners aiming to get more drivers to yield for pedestrians at marked crosswalks as Florida law requires, teamed with local law enforcement to press the issue that pedestrians have the right of way in the street once they enter a crosswalk.
And, with Osceola County students going back to school on Aug. 10, Best Foot Forward and police say it’s the right time to change drivers attitudes, if thousands of smaller feet will be hitting the pavement and crossing streets.
On Thursday, it worked with Kissimmee Police to patrol Oak Street at Emory Avenue, blocks from Thacker Avenue Elementary and Osceola High. And on Monday, St. Cloud Police patrolled Michigan Avenue at 10th and 17th Streets, near Lakeview Elementary on the north and the cluster of schools south of 13th Street, along with Budinger Avenue at Peghorn Way, near St. Cloud Elementary.
In each case, plain-clothes officers purposely crossed the street near traffic, giving drivers enough time to slow down and stop safely.
Vehicles that failed to stop for them were stopped by on-duty officers and issued a warning, or worse, a $166 ticket and three points on their driving record for failing to stop for pedestrian in a crosswalk with signage.
Florida Statute 316.130 is clear: drivers must slow down or stop for a pedestrian crossing the road in a crosswalk, even when signals or signs are not present. Turning drivers must stop for a pedestrian crossing with a permitting walk signal.
According to Best Foot Forward, the largest pedestrian-focused grassroots coalition in the nation, the eighthmost dangerous metro area in the country for pedestrian accidents with cars is Central Florida, where three people are struck each day by cars, and one person is killed each week. Central Florida drivers are only yielding to pedestrians in school zones 43% of the time.
“A lot of drivers just don’t know it’s the law,” Best Foot Forward Program Manager Vince Dyer said. “We do these with our law enforcement partners once every quarter, to reach as many people as we can about the law, and in between we work to get better signage and road striping, anything that can give better visibility to the crosswalks.”
As for stats, on Monday St. Cloud Police issued 14 warnings and seven citations at its three enforcement points, where signs posted spoke to the safety effort. One driver even swerved a bit to avoid the undercover officer.
“Once a pedestrian addresses the crosswalk — comes to the street with an intent to cross, a driver must stop,” said St. Cloud Police Cpl. Matthew Redditt. “For enforcement like this, we’ll watch and see how bad it is. We try to have our officers make it obvious (that they’re crossing) for this.
“Where we do get complaints, our Traffic Enforcement units will go and focus on those areas to knock it down. Patrol units are on the move, and there’s only so many of us, so we don’t get to set up enforcements like this, but we do know it happens all the time.”