On Tuesday, the Florida Department of Transportation will hold a workshop in Lee County to identify where the most dangerous drivers are in Southwest Florida, and speeding isn’t the most dangerous behavior being investigated
FDOT administrators say the purpose of this workshop is to meet with local partner agencies and community members in Southwest Florida to educate them on some of the main safety issues they’re seeing on our roadways and what all of us can do to make our roads safer. This workshop will address the issues in the eleven counties in District One, which includes Collier, Lee and Charlotte counties.
The two main issues FDOT leaders say they’re seeing are aggressive driving and distracted driving, from people not paying attention to posted speed limit signs to others not being patient with other drivers on the road.
Keith Robbins, a safety administrator with FDOT, says that at this workshop, the department will focus on the data it has collected and things that can be done to help lower the speed on our roadways.
“Data that we’re collecting and analyzing, it doesn’t go very far if we don’t have our local partners helping us out in implementing solutions or identifying and implementing solutions to do something about the statistics,” Robbins said. “With that being said, it takes a commitment from everybody involved to do the right thing to help move the needle and lower the number of fatalities and serious injury crashes that we’re seeing on our roadways.”
Based on information from FDOT, there were 233 crashes in Lee County in 2021 and over 400 injuries from those crashes. FDOT engineers say they are focused on reducing serious injuries and fatal crashes as much as possible, and some of their recent data points to the North Fort Myers area as a section of roadway that has them concerned.
“US-41 corridor, in particular, pretty much from the bridge all the way north to where Business 41 and 41 merge… we’re seeing an increase in bike and [pedestrian] crashes, lane departure crashes, particularly around that same general area south of SR-78, and a lot of the time that is usually attributed to speed,” said John Kubicki with FDOT.
FDOT leaders tell WINK News that without local agencies enforcing road regulations, they’re not effective at discouraging dangerous drivers. The workshop is set to start Tuesday morning at 8:30 a.m. and run until 4 p.m. It will take place at FDOT’s area office at 10041 Daniels Parkway.