One Woman’s Decade-Long Struggle for Safer Intersections in Florida

In a unanimous decision earlier this month, the Florida Supreme Court upheld legislation known as the "Mark Wandall Traffic Safety Act," allowing Florida municipalities to continue to use cameras to ticket motorists who run red lights.

It was a victory for safety in the country's most dangerous state for walking. And it was thanks to one woman's long struggle. For more than a decade, Melissa Wandall has led a campaign to prevent others from sharing her fate. She was nine months pregnant in 2003, when she lost her husband to a red-light runner in Bradenton.

Melissa didn't want jail time for the woman who was responsible for Mark's death (she was sentenced to community service and a $500 fine). "I didn’t want to be a broken mommy," she said. "I wanted to take what we had and make sense of it and try to make it better for the next person who came along."

With her baby daughter, Madisyn Grace (now 14) in tow, she started a one-woman lobbying campaign, often driving five hours to Tallahassee to press state lawmakers for action on red-light running.

"There’s no real roadway injury prevention urgency going on in our political system until you share numbers," she said. "You have to keep cultivating these conversations."

More than 5,000 pedestrians were killed in Florida between 2005 and 2014. An Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study of 117 cities, a number of them in Florida, found that those with camera programs have 21 percent fewer fatal red-light-running crashes.

It took six years of testimony and outreach, but in 2010, the Mark Wandall Act was passed.

Now more than 50 municipal governments across the state use red-light cameras. But each year since the law was adopted, there have been attempts to repeal it.

A 2016 appeals court ruling in favor of a motorist who challenged a ticket led municipalities across the state to suspend their camera programs. But the Supreme Court's reversal should settle the matter.

Streetsblog asked Melissa if she thought Mark would be proud of what she has done. "I think he would be happy that I didn’t get lost in my grief," she said.

Wandall was a director of sales for a hotel chain, and had no background in advocacy. Ultimately, she said, her campaign required educating people and exercising patience.

"My husband was an incredible man and he could not wait to be a father," she said. "I never had any anger to the person who did it because it wouldn’t bring him back and wouldn’t help me raise my daughter."