Leon County a crash 'hot spot' as pedestrian, cyclist deaths and injuries mount

Living on opposite ends of the country didn't seem to matter: Ken and Kim Boykin saw their son as often as they could, making every moment count.

But they never thought their last moment with him would be tearful prayers and goodbyes over the phone while he lay unconscious in a Tallahassee hospital bed 1,500 miles away.

Last Sept. 23, the Boykins woke up around 1:15 a.m. to a knock on the door of Kim's parents' home in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where they were visiting. A police officer asked if they were the parents of Jake Boykin and directed them to call the Florida Highway Patrol.

A blur of phone calls led them to Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare where a trauma surgeon told them the doctors had done all they could do.

The Boykins asked if they could put the phone by Jake's ear, got their daughter on another phone so she could join the call, and together they told him how much they loved him.

"They let us talk for as long as we wanted," Kim said through tears during an interview with the USA TODAY NETWORK. "Then they called back later to let us know he'd gone home."

The 25-year-old had been hit and killed by a drunk driver while riding his bike along Wacissa Springs Road in Jefferson County. Boykin, a Florida State University Ph.D. student, was one of seven cyclists last year whose lives were cut short after being hit and killed in the Big Bend, according to the Florida Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles Department's Crash Dashboard.

National deep dive: Safe Streets grants are supposed to save lives. Why are they missing so many deadly roads?

Two years ago, the Biden administration launched the Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) grant program, which started a rollout of $5 billion dollars between 2022 and 2026 to regional, local and tribal initiatives to prevent roadway deaths and injuries.

But a USA TODAY investigation found that millions go unused while many places that desperately need the funds have received little help. Most of the money doled out so far has gone to more affluent counties with lower fatality rates.

Out of the eight counties that make up the Big Bend, six of them haven’t won this federal funding. USA TODAY investigated crash hot spots, determining a street to be a hot spot when at least four fatal crashes occurred between 2017 and 2021. Three counties — Madison, Taylor and Leon — had crash hot spots. But of those three, Leon had the most with a total of four, yet two separate requests for SS4A grant money were denied last year.

A string of capital city and county crash hot spots

Dozens of families like the Boykins have had to carry the weight of a loved one lost to a fatal crash. Since 2020, 161 people have been killed in a car accident within Leon County. Fifty of those deaths were cyclists and pedestrians, according to the FLHSMV Crash Dashboard.

In that same time period, the state agency counted 246 injuries from traffic accidents in the capital county involving bicyclists and 617 injuries involving pedestrians.

A USA TODAY deep dive into crash data involving all types of crashes identified four high-traffic roadways in Tallahassee that were the locations of 18 deaths between 2017 and 2021:

• Six people died on West Tennessee Street between Blountstown Street and Capital Circle Northwest.

• Four people died on Tennessee Street between Meridian Street and North Macomb Street.

• Four people died on South Adams Street between Paul Russell Road and East Magnolia Drive.

• Four people died on West Orange Avenue between South Monroe Street and Wahnish Way.

The Capital Region Transportation Planning Agency (CRTPA), the metropolitan planning organization for Leon, Gadsden, Jefferson and Wakulla counties, conducted a safety analysis while developing its SS4A action plan. It found 10 hot spot intersections among the four counties — eight of which were in Leon County.

The CRTPA declared an intersection a hot spot if there were at least three fatal or serious injury crashes of all types between 2017-21. The organization's list only had one road intersection — Orange Avenue and South Adams Street — that overlapped with USA TODAY's data.

According to the analysis, these were the seven other hot spots:

• One person died and two were seriously injured on Apalachee Parkway and W.W. Kelly Road.

• Seven people were seriously injured on West Tennessee Street and Stadium Drive.

• Three people were seriously injured on West Brevard Street and Old Bainbridge Road.

• Three people were seriously injured on West Tennessee Street and Geddie Road.

• Two people died and two were seriously injured on North Monroe Street and Fred George Road.

• Three people were seriously injured on North Monroe Street and Lakeshore Drive.

• One person died and two were seriously injured on West Tennessee Street and Aenon Church Road.

But even with these crash hot spots, the U.S. Department of Transportation denied both the City of Tallahassee and Leon County the millions of dollars they asked for to improve the capital city and county's streets.

The city asked for $9.6 million to fund its Jake Gaither Community Pedestrian and Street Safety Improvements project, which was slated to cost $12 million at the time the grant was requested, according to USDOT records. The grant would've funded pedestrian and street safety improvements to roadways in the Jake Gaither Community, which is just south of the crash hot spot on West Orange Avenue.

The project's goal is to construct pedestrian facilities and implement safety countermeasures such as crosswalk visibility enhancements and roadway design improvements at curves with a focus on Ridge Road.

The county asked for $5.8 million to fund its Old St. Augustine Sidewalk Project, which was slated to cost $7.3 million at the time the grant was requested, according to USDOT records. The grant would've funded a sidewalk between Winchester Road and Paul Russell Road.

More: Study reveals Leon County is one of top 3 in Florida with pedestrian-involved crashes

The road, which is a designated canopy road, is very narrow and doesn't have large shoulders, forcing pedestrians to walk along the edge of the road or in the ditches. While the county didn't receive a SS4A grant, Leon County spokesperson Kianna Gilley said this project was approved for other federal funds that will be available in 2026.

"Leon County maintains ongoing communication with FDOT (Florida Department of Transportation) and CRTPA to seek funding opportunities," Gilley said. But unless federal or state funds roll in, the county foots the bill.

Safe street projects wage on

Despite not being backed by SS4A grant money, both the city and county are continuously working on these two projects, among numerous other road improvement initiatives that are focused on things such as bridge replacements, accessibility enhancements, corridor and intersection improvements, sidewalk and trail constructions and lighting enhancements.

Gilley said two notable projects in the county's Long-Range Transportation Plan are the widening of Orange Avenue from South Monroe Street to Blair Stone Road and improving Buck Lake Road from Mahan Drive to Pedrick Road.

The Orange Avenue project separated bike lanes and sidewalks to improve safety, transformed the two-lane road into a four-lane road and installed a roundabout at the Jim Lee Road intersection, she said.

The Buck Lake Road project also included sidewalks and bike lanes, enhancing "user safety for all riders," as well as added an extension of the existing four-lane section to Davis Drive and improved the two-lane section from Davis Drive to Pedrick Road.

CRTPA Director Greg Slay said the organization is currently working on finalizing its North Monroe Street Safety Implementation Plan to be eligible to apply for the next round of SS4A grants this year. Plans are required when putting your name in the hat for this "highly, highly competitive grant program," he said.

The CRTPA's safety analysis revealed that North Monroe Street was a high-injury corridor, so efforts are directed toward finding approaches that will ultimately reduce serious accidents along this stretch. Once they complete this, they will shift their focus to Apalachee Parkway, another high-injury corridor, he said.

Something they see a lot of are pedestrian crashes, Slay said: "There's a pedestrian crossing the road that just stepped off the sidewalk, and somebody is coming into the intersection making a right turn, and they never look to their right. They're looking back to the left."

Pedestrian-related accidents are a major issue but hard to address because they're dispersed throughout the county.

"We don't really have clusters where we can come in and say if we put a crosswalk here, we can solve this problem," he said. And bicycle crashes are even more scattered.

'Senseless and preventable'

Of all the things a parent worries about, her kid biking down a country road in broad daylight wasn't ever on Kim's list.

Jake's love for cycling and competition was all consuming. He had his eyes set on the Six Gap Century’s 100-mile course through the North Georgia mountains but he never got the chance to cross the finish line.

Just two days before the race, the national cycling champion was hit by a pickup truck on Wacissa Springs Road. The driver fled the scene and was located a short time later with Jake's bike "impaled into the front grill area," according to the Florida Highway Patrol report.

More: 'An incredible human’: Noted cyclist, FSU doctoral student dies after hit-and-run

Jake's parents said they felt like they were finally reaching the point where their son wasn't just their kid — he was becoming their friend.

"Our lives were never boring," Kim said. "He was always so much fun. It just feels quiet without him."

After the crash, Ken and Kim received numerous messages "from all sorts of people" telling them how Jake impacted them. Jake's family flew to Tallahassee after the crash to have a memorial ride in his honor, and a woman asked one of their family friends how she knew him.

One family friend said, "'Oh, I've known him since he was nine months old. I've watched him grow up,'" Kim said. "And then she said, 'How do you know Jake?' And (the woman) goes, 'Well, I didn't.' "

The woman told her that Jake had stopped to help her change her tire one day when she was stranded on the side of the road. He got her name and number and would check in every once and while to make sure she was still doing all right.

His big heart and love for life are what defined Jake: "He got more out of every moment than most people do in a lifetime," Kim said.

They are working through this unimaginable loss by breathing and "trying to find what the outlets are to one, put our energy in and two, to make sure that this doesn't happen to any other families cause it's..." Ken said, trailing off in thought.

Lots of roads don't have provisions for cyclists and pedestrians, Kim said.

"These deaths are so senseless and preventable," she said.

Change needs to come from all levels of government, Ken said. It's easy to live in your own world and not think about the issue until it actually hits home.

Now, feeling the weight of the issue more than he ever wanted to, everything reminds Ken of his son, flooding his mind with memories. But he knows the chance to make more ended on the side of a road in Jefferson County, Florida.

USA TODAY's Investigative Data Reporter Austin Fast contributed to this article. Breaking & trending news reporter Elena Barrera can be reached at ebarrera@tallahassee.com. Follow her on X: @elenabarreraaa.

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Dangerous Tallahassee roads, intersections for cars, pedestrians, cyclists