- February 11, 2025
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The city of Ormond Beach has received funding for a High Visibility Enforcement campaign to try and cut down the number of pedestrian and bicycle accidents involving vehicles.
Police will be at intersections and crosswalks watching for infractions for a time period they will announce later. The first phase will be education, letting people know what they’ve done wrong, and an enforcement phase will follow.
“We’re not going to try to trick anybody”
JESSE GODFREY, police chief
Since January 2015, there have been 28 vehicle vs. pedestrian crashes and 25 vehicle vs. bicyclist crashes in Ormond Beach. One was a fatality and several others involved serious bodily injury. Also since January 2015, a total of 264 traffic citations were written in reference to crosswalk and red light violations.
Police Chief Jesse Godfrey said he was in Washington, D.C. recently and when he stepped into a crosswalk he was surprised to see cars stop to let him cross.
“In Florida, we’re not real good at that,” he said.
In the Ormond Beach HVE campaign, in addition to officers watching specific locations, an officer in plain clothes will enter a crosswalk (with a known safe stopping distance of oncoming traffic) to see if vehicles will yield.
State law says traffic must stop for a pedestrian in a crosswalk. At intersections, one of the problems is people turning right on red when a pedestrian, who has a walk light, is in their path in the intersection.
Police have not yet announced the dates and locations of the HVE but Godfrey said everything will be announced to the public through a press release.
“It’s going to be overt,” he said. “We’re not going to try to trick anybody.”
The City Commission voted in favor of receiving the funds at their Feb. 7 meeting. The grant is available from the University of South Florida’s Center for Urban Transportation Research and the funding is from the Florida Dept. of Transportation.
The grant is available for law enforcement agencies which are within the top 20 Florida counties with the greatest number of pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities. Crashes involving pedestrians and bicyclists are more likely to result in fatal or serious injuries than any other types of crashes, and the financial impacts and suffering caused by these crashes are significant and sometimes catastrophic.
Funds through the HVE program can only be used to fund officer overtime hours spent conducting on-street enforcement operations. The program will pay officer overtime and benefits through May 15, 2017, up to $13,815.36. There are no required matching funds.
