HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla. — A man was arrested after Tampa police say he admitted to crashing into a bicyclist in a deadly hit-and-run Sunday night.
It's now the 36th death of a pedestrian or cyclist in Hillsborough County so far this year.
For years, walkers and bikers have called for an infrastructure change to keep them safer.
“A lot of our neighborhoods were built with cars in mind so we are desperately trying to catch up on infrastructure that provides opportunities for different kinds of mobility,” Emily Hinsdale said, board member for Walk Bike Tampa.
Plan Hillsborough Executive Planner Gena Torres said her agency is working to fix the problem.
“We are looking at our streets differently and recognizing that lots of people need to use the street other than just people driving,” she said.
The bicyclist who died in the hit-and-run Sunday night was struck on North 50th Street, and Hillsborough County lists that same street in their top 10 most dangerous corridors in the county.
“We’ve done studies on those individual roads, and we said 'wow, there’s not a crossing here', or 'there is missing sidewalk here, here and here,” Torres said.
Torres said some solutions are cheap, like adding more crosswalks and widening bike lanes, but others require more money.
“Street lighting is expensive, but it’s really effective. A lot of our fatalities with pedestrians are happening at dark times,” she said.
Torres also said there needs to be an urgent solution to this deadly problem.
“It’s such a pervasive problem, I’d go out on the limb to say that all of our agencies are aware of it and concerned about it," she said. "We’re dedicated to trying to see these numbers in deaths go down. And it’s not just numbers, it’s people's lives saved.”