Miami Personal Injury Lawyer Blog

Four Florida cities are among the top ten most dangerous cities for pedestrians in the United States, according to USA Today.

Orlando is No. 1

A study by Transportation for America, a safety advocacy coalition, found the Orlando - Kissimmee metro area to be the deadliest metro area for pedestrians in the United States with 550 pedestrians killed in the last decade alone. The list included only cities with more than one million inhabitants. With Tampa - St. Petersburg - Clearwater as number 2; Jacksonville as number 3 and Miami - Ft. Lauderdale - Pompano Beach as number 4, Florida was the State with more cities on the list.

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A pedestrian was killed early this morning by an SUV while crossing the intersection of Melaleuca Lane and Wiggins Road in Lake Worth. The elderly victim, Fatemeh Kazemishahmirzadi, was crossing in front of a vehicle in the lane closest to the median when the vehicle in the next lane hit her, maybe because the driver did not see her.

Florida Law states that motor vehicles must always yield to pedestrians, specially when these are crossing at an intersection and regardless of whether the crossing is marked or not. However, this fact alone (i.e., a driver failing to yield to the pedestrian) does not determine who was at fault in this kind of accidents. Therefore, an investigation is opened to find other facts, like whether the driver could have seen the pedestrian and/or whether the light was green.

Statistics by the Florida Department of Higway Safety and Motor Vehicles (see Florida Traffic Crash Statistics) seem to show that pedestrians between the ages of 75 and 84 are a particularly vulnerable group which accounts for 22.22 percent of all pedestrian fatalities that occurring when a pedestrian was crossing at an intersection in this State.

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