Residents living along Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street South in St. Petersburg say they have watched the road take too many lives, and they are done waiting quietly for the city to act. Five people have died in car accidents along the corridor over the last five years, and a group of neighbors now plans to bring that number directly to city council this week, demanding money for speed bumps, crosswalks, street lights and reflectors before anyone else is killed.
William Hitchcock, who has lived near the road since 2016, said the losses have piled up while the street stays largely unchanged. “We've been losing a lot of lives and do not want to lose more before changes are made,” Hitchcock said, according to Tampa Bay 28. The pain is personal for him: he said a friend was hit by a car and killed a few weeks ago while trying to use a crosswalk on the corridor.
Justin Cournoyer, vice president of the Campbell Park Neighborhood Association, put it bluntly, saying five deaths in a five-year period constitute a crisis and that something must be done. He said residents feel unsafe on the street because it is, in his words, very unsafe. Neighbors interviewed for the report said the road is so dangerous that they try to avoid the area altogether, choosing alleyways parallel to MLK instead of walking or biking down the street itself.
A Pattern of Fatal Crashes Along the Corridor
The frustration did not emerge in a vacuum. Just weeks ago, 47-year-old Kendra Dillard was killed while using a marked crosswalk at MLK Street South and 15th Avenue South, and the driver fled the scene, according to Hoodline's earlier coverage of the case. In May, a two-vehicle collision at MLK Street South and 9th Avenue South killed one woman and sent two other people to the hospital, and in February 2025, pedestrian Tevin Griffin was fatally struck by a driver who later faced DUI and hit-and-run charges.
Because the road has limited crosswalks, residents said people cross wherever they can rather than walking blocks out of their way to find a marked one. That habit, combined with speeding traffic, is part of why the MLK South Safe Streets Coalition and the Campbell Park Neighborhood Association are pushing the city to treat the corridor as an emergency rather than a long-term planning problem.
What Residents Are Asking City Council to Fund
The coalition plans to voice its concerns to city council on Thursday, with volunteers specifically asking that the city allocate money in next year's budget for safety improvements. Their list is concrete: speed bumps, additional street lights, reflectors and more crosswalks along Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street South. Hitchcock also urged drivers themselves to slow down, follow posted signs, look ahead, stay off their phones and pay attention behind the wheel.
The demand for quick, visible fixes stands in contrast to slower-moving infrastructure work already underway nearby. The city secured a $1.38 million federal Department of Transportation grant in March 2025 to design converting MLK Street and Eighth Street downtown from one-way roads into two-way streets meant to slow traffic, a project that could eventually widen sidewalks, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Separately, federal lawmakers allocated $2 million in early 2026 for stormwater upgrades along MLK Street South and 4th Street to fix chronic flooding, with that project not expected to wrap up until 2028.
A Corridor That Fits a Regional Danger Pattern
The neighborhood's complaints line up with data from across the region. Forward Pinellas, the county's planning agency, has found that just 4% of Pinellas County's roadway network accounts for 60% of all fatal and severe injury crashes under its Safe Streets High Injury Network analysis. The Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater metro area was ranked the eighth most dangerous in the country for pedestrians in Smart Growth America's 2026 Dangerous by Design report, which tallied 618 pedestrian deaths across the region between 2020 and 2024.
Enforcement data suggests speed is a major factor on MLK South specifically. During a targeted south-zone traffic operation in February, St. Petersburg police issued more than 180 speeding tickets, with 74 of those going to drivers caught traveling 20 to 29 mph over the posted limit on the corridor. That comes even though the city adopted a Complete Streets Policy back in 2015 meant to guarantee roadways serve pedestrians, cyclists, drivers and transit riders alike, and even though Pinellas County committed to a Vision Zero plan aiming to eliminate all traffic deaths and severe injuries by 2045.
For residents like Hitchcock and Cournoyer, those long-range goals and multi-year construction timelines offer little comfort against a death toll they say keeps climbing on their own street. Their message to city council Thursday is simple: fund the fixes now, before the corridor claims another name.
