County hopes to eliminate 49th Street crash ‘hotspots’

Local leaders continue working to increase safety along one of Pinellas County’s most dangerous roads for pedestrians and bicyclists.

The 49^th Street corridor is part of a “High Injury Network” that accounts for 40% of serious and fatal vehicular crashes while comprising just 3% of area roadways. St. Petersburg officials and community stakeholders have already agreed to a series of changes – including lane repurposing and establishing bus bays – along a southern section of the corridor that borders Gulfport.

County commissioners are now discerning potential improvements farther north. Their Jan. 9 workshop discussion centered around crash-prone locations in unincorporated Lealman and the Highpoint area, near the St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport.

Adam Purcell, transportation planner for multination infrastructure consultancy firm AECOM, said his recommendations resulted from a year of data analysis and community outreach. He noted that “great” feedback “really informed” the process.

“We’re looking at 49^th Street to identify conditions along the road that make it hazardous and then identify proven safety countermeasures we can implement,” Purcell explained. “We’re doing this in hopes of setting ourselves up for additional federal funding.”

A map highlighting the focus areas along 49th Street North. Image: Pinellas County Government.

The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) awarded local planning agency Forward Pinellas a $560,000 Safe Streets for All (SS4A) Grant in February 2023. The funding supports the Safe Streets Pinellas Action Plan.

The county then received a $2.5 million DOT grant for the Pinellas I-PED (impaired pedestrian-bicycle evaluation and demonstration) project in December 2023. The local match is $625,000.

Over $2 billion remains in SS4A coffers, and the initiative sunsets in 2026. Purcell said AECOM’s report will, hopefully, support a competitive grant application that secures much-needed funding to improve safety along 49^th Street.

The roughly 13-mile corridor runs north from Gulfport to the Bayside Bridge. The latest plan’s southern focus area encompasses 40^th Avenue to 62^nd Avenue North in Lealman, just outside St. Petersburg’s city limits, and between Ulmerton and Roosevelt Boulevards, west of the airport.

“A lot of times, safety projects can be implemented based on crash data alone,” Purcell said. “But we really wanted to bring in the factors of the people and places … affected by these improvements to ensure they have an impact and work within the locations they’re designed to address.”

Activity centers along 49^th Street in the northern focus area include Bayside High School, the Pinellas County Jail and Pinellas Safe Harbor, an expansive homeless facility. The primary concern around the southern section is HCA Florida North Side Hospital.

Purcell noted about 1,000 employees enter and exit the hospital daily. Community stakeholders said aggressive and distracted driving were their top two concerns, followed by pedestrians and bicyclists crossing the six-lane thoroughfare at unprotected locations.

“We know where the crashes are occurring, but where are the near misses occurring?” Purcell asked rhetorically. “So, we asked them (stakeholders) to identify where they observed near misses, and those generally correspond with our crash hot spots.”

Accident-prone locations include the intersection of 58^th Avenue North at the hospital. Purcell said the AECOM team witnessed vehicles nearly hitting ambulances “in our limited time in the field.”

He noted that 15% of vehicles traveled at least 5 mph above the corridor’s posted speed limits. Purcell said its two bus routes carry 600 passengers daily, which creates a deadly combination of “fast cars” and “lots of bicycles and pedestrians.”

A graphic highlighting some of the study’s key findings. Image: Pinellas County government.

Solutions

Over 50% of serious and fatal crashes along 49^th Street involve bicycles and pedestrians. Purcell said buses typically stop in traffic to pick up or drop off riders, and Commissioner Vince Nowicki asked if a dedicated lane was a project consideration.

Purcell said stakeholder opinions were nearly evenly split on creating dedicated bus lanes. Traffic studies showed that reducing 49^th Street from six to four lanes – and decreasing speed limits – would significantly increase congestion by 2045.

The thoroughfare is also a designated semi-truck and evacuation route, and AECOM is not recommending repurposing lanes. While the firm does support creating adjacent bus bays on publicly owned land, Purcell said that is not feasible in Lealman due to the number of businesses fronting 49^th Street.

AECOM identified 80 safety countermeasures, with 42 in Lealman, 30 in the northern focus area and eight throughout the corridor. Those include upgraded lighting, modified signal timing, enhanced pavement markings and, where practical, adjusting driveway and median access and creating multimodal pathways along existing right-of-ways.

Additional site improvements include better drainage systems and landscaping. “Sometimes, it’s just as simple as maintenance,” Purcell said.

“We noted a lot of places where trees or bushes have encroached on the sidewalk,” he added. “So, we have a five-foot sidewalk that’s now a three-foot sidewalk of usable space.”

Purcell said the county has already contracted with Duke Energy to install LED streetlights and modified pedestrian signals to increase crossing intervals. He will more thoroughly detail the 80 recommendations and highlight more mid-to-long-term solutions once AECOM completes its final reports later this month.