Summary

By our single-minded focus on single-occupant vehicle travel, Florida fails to provide transportation choices to over one-third of its residents – children and the elderly, the disabled or poor, students, transit riders, or anyone who chooses not to drive. Because of inadequate or dangerous pedestrian and transit facilities, these residents must either depend on a motorist to transport them or remain immobilized and isolated.

Lack of transportation choices falls most heavily on the elderly residents who are unable to drive or are impaired drivers. This significantly degrades their quality of life and health, and elderly pedestrians are disproportionate killed or injured by motorists. This is an intolerable burden on our elderly and a major barrier to a truly elder-ready Florida.

The problem will grow even more intolerable in the future, unless our transportation policies change. Florida’s elderly population will double by the year 2025. The elderly over 85 are our fastest-growing age cohort. Yet Florida policy-makers continue to devote almost all surface transportation spending on new and expanded roadways – and almost all traffic safety funds to improving motorist safety only. This not only diverts scarce funds away from needed pedestrian and transit facilities, the roadway projects built usually have the perverse effect of making walking and riding transit even more dangerous and inconvenient for the elderly.

Florida policy-makers can no longer ignore this urgent problem. They should undertake in-depth studies of the current and future transportation needs of Florida’s elderly to identify deficiencies and dangers. Then Florida state and local transportation officials should begin a comprehensive program to make the necessary infrastructure and operating improvements. Only then will Florida, and its transportation system, be truly "elder ready."

The Problem: Lack of Transportation Choices
The visible problems . . .

The Florida Department of Transportation reported that 37 percent of Florida residents in 1994 did not or could no drive a motor vehicle. Today, that percentage numbers nearly six million Floridians. They are children, disabled, elderly, poor or students, or have other reasons for not driving.

Florida spent only 71 cents per resident on pedestrian projects in 1997-98, compared to $52 per resident on highway projects. As a result, there is a serious lack of sidewalks, accessible transit stops, safe intersections, connector paths, traffic calming, signaled crosswalks, audible pedestrian signals, shade and shelter, and other transportation facilities to serve the mobility needs of non-motorists. This deprives them of the choice of any alternative to the automobile for transportation.

Decision-makers instead continue to expand a system of high-speed roadways that immobilizes these six million Floridians and encourages motorists to drive ever-increasing distances at unsafe speeds throughout our communities, especially in residential and commercial areas, endangering pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit riders.

The unchecked growth of low-density sprawl growth patterns in Florida compounds this problem. Sprawl disperses new residential, commercial, and institutional development to ever more distant areas that cannot be economically served by public transit – and by creating blight in urban centers and inner-ring suburbs where transit could be a viable choice.

Converging with these transportation and development trends is the projected huge increase of elderly residents in Florida, including many who will need transportation choices other than the automobile. Now numbering 2.8 million, Florida’s elderly will double by 2025 to 5.3 million. The elderly will increase from 18 percent to 26 percent of Florida’s population by 2025. In 22 of Florida’s 67 counties, the elderly will comprise more than 30 percent of the residents.

According to the U.S. Administration on Aging in 1998, 37 percent of the nation’s elderly report that they are limited by chronic conditions, and over one-half report that they have at least one disability. These include arthritis that can limit mobility, hearing and vision problems, and other impairments that limit their ability to drive.

For that matter, anyone who lives long enough will need some other mode of transportation than the automobile. The impairments of old age should not mean immobility and isolation.

And the consequences . . .
Walking is the most dangerous transportation activity in Florida, per distance traveled. Nineteen percent of all traffic fatalities in Florida in 1997-98 were pedestrians. Elderly pedestrians are especially at risk. Nationwide, 22 percent of all pedestrians killed were over 65, even though they comprise only 13 percent of the population.

Florida is the most dangerous state in America for walking. Tampa-St. Petersburg in 1997-98 was the nation’s most dangerous large metropolitan area for pedestrians, and three of the next four most dangerous were in the Florida: Miami-Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, and Jacksonville. West Palm Beach-Boca Raton was the seventh most dangerous. (Atlanta was second, and Phoenix was sixth.)

Walking is just as dangerous in smaller cities. For example, in Leon County in the last 10 years (1991-2000) motorists killed 48 pedestrians and injured 1,023 in many accidents that would not have happened had adequate facilities been in place. Pedestrian deaths accounted for 14 percent of all traffic deaths in those years. Only the decline of walking and bicycling by Florida residents – an unfortunate, but rational, response – has kept this toll of deaths and injuries from being higher.

This systematic neglect of pedestrian facilities also severely restricts the ability of the elderly to use conveniently or safely a fixed-route bus or rail system, degrading the availability of these vital transportation modes. For example, elderly people who cannot cross the street safely to get to a bus stop or have a paved sidewalk from a bus stop to a destination, cannot fully use this system.

Increasingly unable to drive, walk, or ride transit systems, Florida’s elderly have fewer and fewer opportunities to travel conveniently to work, shop, use medical or other services, attend cultural or social events, or simply to visit friends and family. Our failure to meet these transportation needs seriously diminishes the quality of life, as well as health, of the elderly.

Florida’s Transportation Disadvantaged Program of demand-responsive van service can fill some of these unmet transportation needs but should be reserved for use only by persons so impaired that this program is the only practical means of mobility. Greater funding is critical, but so are expanded pedestrian and transit facilities so that the elderly able to walk or ride transit can do so and not require Transportation Disadvantaged rides that could go for the truly impaired.

The transportation problems of the elderly will be even more intolerable in the future if current trends continue. Not only will many of Florida’s 5.3 million elderly be unable to drive an automobile, far more of them than today will live in sprawl communities not served by public transit systems, or even by sidewalks, and there will be no economical way to provide such services.

The Solutions: Transportation Choices
Florida should adopt a statewide goal to have in place by 2025 a truly "elder-ready" system of transportation choices that provides full mobility and safety to the 5.3 million elderly residents expected here by that year. "In an Elder Ready Community, driving is an option, not a necessity," stated Secretary of Elder Affairs Gema Hernandez.

Every Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) District and Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) should undertake comprehensive studies to identify specific problems that limit the transportation choices available to the elderly. These problems should include funding priorities, transportation facility design standards, land-use policies, housing and mixed-use redevelopment programs, and compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards.

Based on the findings of these studies, the FDOT Districts and MPOs should include specific construction and retrofit projects for the elderly in their 2020 Needs Plans, Long Range Transportation Plans, Bicycle/Pedestrian Plans, Annual Work Programs, and Transportation Improvement Plans.

Local governments should also adopt policies to encourage the expansion of affordable and safe housing for the elderly in urban centers where they can walk or ride transit to essential services such as health care, retail businesses, libraries and recreation centers, and government agencies. Local governments should keep such services in urban center locations. They should also not subsidize new elderly housing in locations where such services are distant and inaccessible.

In the construction and retrofit of transportation facilities for the elderly, the FDOT Districts and MPOs should include such improvements as:

• Begin programs to systematically expand sidewalk networks on both sides of all arterial and collector roads in Urban Services Areas;

• Require that builders include sidewalks on all local streets in new housing subdivisions;

• Provide shade trees or other shelter along sidewalks to minimize the exposure of pedestrians to the elements, especially Florida’s often blazing sun;

• Review compliance of existing pedestrian and transit infrastructure for compliance with ADA standards for accessibility;

• Time traffic signals to accommodate the longer time needed by elderly pedestrians to cross at intersections, and install audible signals for the sight impaired;

• Consider limiting "right turn on red" on urban streets which serve elderly and sight-impaired pedestrians;

• Adopt a intersection design standard that no pedestrian must cross more than three lanes of traffic without a pedestrian refuge at medians and between turning and through lanes;

• Install signaled crosswalks on "barrier roads" at bus stops and rail stations and where essential services are located, to ensure safe pedestrian crossing;

• Install benches and shelters, emergency call-boxes and raised curbs (to facilitate boarding), at bus stops frequented by elderly and disabled riders; and

• Build off-road paved pathways that connect cul-de-sacs and subdivisions to each other and to shopping and other centers, and require such pathways in new projects; and

• Reduce hazards on urban roads frequented by elderly pedestrians and transit riders by lowered speed limits, camera enforcement of red light running and speeding, and traffic calming design features such as landscaping, curb extensions, narrower lanes and, when necessary, speed humps.

The FDOT Districts, MPOs, and local governments should adopt related transportation and development policies that can significantly improve the safety and mobility of elderly pedestrians and transit riders, such as:

• Limit new low-density sprawl development patterns that separate residents from each other and from essential services, recognizing the future burdens of person who may prefer "aging in place" to moving away;

• Emphasize mixed-use development to concentrate development of new affordable and safe housing for the elderly in urban centers where pedestrian and transit facilities and essential services are likeliest to be convenient, and are attractive alternatives to sprawl housing;

• Adopt development policies that encourage public agencies, churches, health care and social service providers, and commercial establishments to cluster facilities where the elderly can accomplish several tasks in a single trip;

• Discourage disconnected street patterns, such as cul-de-sacs that branch off collector streets, and encourage interconnected street patterns, such as grids or other designs that offer multiple routes to local destinations;

• Ease setback requirements in urban centers, so that shops and other services can be next to sidewalks and not require lengthy – and dangerous – walks through parking lots (nine percent of all pedestrian injuries happen in parking lots); and

• Improve transit service in urban centers with expanded service at night and weekends, more frequent service, and routes that serve elderly needs.

Conclusion
A truly elder-ready Florida will require a policy paradigm shift that understands the need for safety and mobility for over one-third of residents unable to drive an automobile. Such a Florida would provide safe and convenient transportation choices. This will require careful planning, sensitivity to the needs of the elderly and others, and the resources needed to these choices a reality.

It has taken a half-century to dismantle most of the pedestrian and transit infrastructure that once existed and to eliminate transportation choices in Florida. But it need not take a half-century to restore these choices – if we have the political will to accomplish this goal. Surely we do.

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