The U.S. Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Safe Streets and Roads for All program awarded the City of Pensacola a $140,800 planning grant to conduct a comprehensive roadway lighting safety assessment through the Illuminating Safety in Pensacola project.
At his weekly presser, Mayor D.C. Reeves said, “This planning grant will allow us to conduct a city-wide lighting assessment and address our city’s generational lighting issues in a data-driven way,”
The project’s assessment will include a deficiency analysis, inventory needs, and best practices for effective lighting installations that address safety for vulnerable users during dark conditions and improve the safety and security of all road users, including those in wheelchairs and other mobility devices. The supplemental planning effort will address the need to study improved and expanded lighting options — a top priority identified in the city’s 2023 Active Transportation Plan.
The mayor said the assessment will be similar to how Public Works surveyed city streets to determine repaving priorities. “Let’s go get an assessment of everything that we have and figure out where our top priorities need to be. I’m excited to have that. Now, we’re making decisions based on data, not on conjecture or whoever calls us last. I think we should be looking at it holistically.”
This funding is in addition to the $176,000 DOT grant the city was awarded in November 2023 to pilot and evaluate temporary roadway enhancements and traffic calming activities, such as shared lane markings and curb extensions on Gonzalez Street. The 2023 funding was also awarded to conduct road safety audits at key intersections on the city’s High Injury Network to analyze crashes and identify engineering countermeasures using a safe systems approach.
Mayor Reeves reported that the city spent about $1 million on paving in Fiscal Year 2024. “The crews were able to extend to an additional 20 blocks. So we actually paved more than 60 blocks of new roadway, and 15 blocks remain for Fiscal Year 2025.”
City staff analyzed the condition of every city street in our city. The mayor said, “We went and fixed those 60 blocks that needed it the most. It wasn’t just picking streets at random or splitting it up by seven districts and saying, ‘We’re going to put seven equal amounts of new pavement and seven different districts.’ There’re where it might just be an intersection that got repaved because of its condition. It might be one block; it might be two blocks. So appreciative of our team and everybody in public works who made that happen.”
To learn more about Safe Streets and Roads for All program, visit the U.S. Department of Transportation website.
