By Ines Aviles-Spadoni, M.S., M.A., Research/Communications Coordinator, UFTI
The streets of Key West always buzz with life. On any given day, you’ll see tourists pedaling past charming pastel-colored cottages, tourists stepping off sunbaked cruise ships wandering about, and roosters – yes, roosters – strutting confidently around town.
But beneath all that charm is a serious concern shared by those who live in the City of Key West: Key West’s streets aren’t always safe for its residents and tourists — or even roosters, for that matter.
About 17% of residents in Key West rely on walking, biking, or other micromobility – like scooters or e-bikes – to get around. Combine that with more than a million visitors each year on an island only two by five miles wide, and congestion and safety risks quickly escalate.
Although the city has invested in bike and multi-use paths, most routes pass through busy residential and commercial districts, increasing the chances of conflict between different types of road users.
A Partnership for Safety
To address these challenges, the University of Florida Transportation Institute’s (UFTI) Transportation Technology Transfer (T2) Center has teamed up with the City of Key West to develop a comprehensive Safety Action Plan. Guided by the Vision Zero philosophy, which works to eliminate traffic fatalities, the plan combines community input, crash data, and federal Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) program guidelines.
Shraddha Sagar, Ph.D., an assistant engineer faculty at T2, is the principal investigator of the study. She said the demands placed on Key West streets are very different from those in most communities on the Florida mainland.
“Key West is a compact island city with a unique mix of residents, workers, and millions of annual visitors,” she said. “That combination creates unusual safety pressures, from high pedestrian and bike volumes in tourist areas, to e-bike, and scooter use on narrow streets, to the need to balance mixed-use traffic across the single U.S. 1 connection.”
The new safety plan will help Key West achieve its broader goals of sustainability, livability, and resilience while ensuring that infrastructure, enforcement, and education strategies prioritize equity and safety for all road users.
Safety Hotspots and Emerging Issues
Early analysis has highlighted several priority concerns:
- Unsafe e-bike and scooter use on sidewalks and crosswalks
- High-risk intersections and corridors, especially The Triangle (US-1 and North Roosevelt), North Roosevelt Boulevard, and Flagler Avenue
- Pedestrian crossing challenges from long signal cycles, missing crosswalks, and failure-to-yield behaviors
- Congestion in Old Town caused by narrow streets, parking maneuvers, and tourist drop-offs
- Aggressive and distracted driving leading to rear-end and red-light crashes
Chris Hamilton, who is the founder of Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown, and a member of the research study’s Task Force, said The Triangle location is particularly concerning, noting that 35% of injury crashes occur in that location and 40% involve rear-end collisions, including other incidents in low-light conditions.
“With over 100 recorded crashes, it’s more than busy – it’s dangerous,” Hamilton said. “This hotspot captured community concern and now anchors the city’s safety reevaluation.”
Community Voices
Ensuring that residents’ perspectives shape the plan is a priority. Leading that effort is Elisa Levy of Levy Consulting. Levy has lived in Key West for 25 years and said with tourism reaching record highs in such a small, condensed space, safety has become a challenge, such as with micromobility.
“In recent years, like many other communities, we’ve seen a sharp rise in e-bikes and scooters,” she said. “These vehicles play an important role, especially for our workforce getting to and from jobs, but the lack of clear policies and the difficulty of enforcement make traveling across the island increasingly unsafe.”
With Levy’s guidance, and the support from City of Key West staff Ryan Stachurski, multimodal transportation coordinator, and Ray Atkinson, sustainable transportation coordinator, the Task Force is bringing together stakeholders from the city and relevant agencies.
“This group plays a critical role in integrating local knowledge into the plan,” Levy said. “The city’s leadership and active involvement have been central to the process, and that partnership is what will ultimately make the plan both credible and implementable.”
Levy, who is very much tuned in to the island’s heartbeat, reflected on the results of a recent survey.
“Our community survey, with 728 responses, shed light on the issue: 41% of respondents reported being in a crash within the last five years,” she said. “Even more concerning, 78% said they never reported the incident. This means that the official crash data, which is already high, likely underestimates the true number of crashes by a wide margin.”
Levy said the city’s Safety Action Plan will be more than just policy and numbers. She said it will be about analyzing crashes, listening to the community, and “putting real solutions in place,” in addition to pursuing grant funding and launching projects to ensure that island travel is safe for everyone.
Building a Model for Other Cities
For Sagar, one of the most significant aspects of the project has been the level of community engagement.
“The Task Force is a great example,” she said. “It brings residents, advocates, and agencies to the same table, all sharing ideas and experiences with a genuine commitment to making Key West safer.”
Led by the UFTI’s T2 Center, Elisa Levy, and the City of Key West, this collaboration is expected to create a model that other cities in Florida facing similar safety challenges can emulate.
But on an island known for its quaint, colorful homes, free-roaming roosters, and welcoming charm, making streets safer is ultimately about protecting those who live, work, and visit the Conch Republic.