Police are launching a road safety operation in Queensland after a spate of pedestrian incidents left five dead and another four injured in less than a month.
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A Sunshine Coast family were left grieving after six-year-old Indie Armstrong died after being hit by a hatchback while crossing a car park with her grandmother and older sister on Sunday.
On Monday, a woman was rushed to hospital with significant leg injuries after she was struck by a bus while crossing Adelaide Street in Brisbane City.
The recent incidents follow after a woman, 67, died and a man, 67, was left injured as they crossed a Browns Plains road at traffic lights last Thursday.
On June 6, a man was left in a critical condition after being hit by a vehicle in Aspley, just one day after Caroline Davis was killed on a Chelmer road while out for a jog on the morning of her 33rd birthday.
Two weeks earlier, mother-of-two Anne Marie Stent lost her life after being hit by a bus while crossing Ann Street in Brisbane city.
Twenty-year-old Michael Bowden was walking home from a party on June 9 when he was killed in an alleged hit-and-run incident in far north Queensland.
Road Policing Command superintendent David Johnson said while he couldn’t comment on any individual cases, the number of recent pedestrian deaths was “very concerning”.
“To see these ... in such a short timeframe is completely alarming,” he said.
“We are talking about the behaviour of pedestrians with technology but drivers as well, distraction with drivers, even in the low speeds in the CBD areas, it is still putting lives at risk.”
He said people also put themselves at risk when they took shortcuts through areas of Brisbane city, including walking on the other side of road barriers, around walkways and crossing at red signals.
“We will be taking a response from the police side to try and improve pedestrian and road user safety throughout Queensland,” he said.
“We target safety on the roads across the whole of Queensland and we look at the evidence to point out where we should best use our resources and the appropriate response.
“In the CBD area we will be looking at an operation around pedestrian safety and we also have advice to our road policing officers in the area about the behaviour to watch out for and to enforce for the purpose of safety and education.”
South-east Queensland operations acting inspector Gareth Bosley said pedestrian safety was always a concern, particularly in populated areas.
“We see greater levels of inappropriate behaviour where you have greater levels of congestion,” he said.
“Those pedestrian intersections in the heart of the CBD are typically some of our worst spots of compliance.
“It is something we are seeing growing nowadays with increasing levels of distraction.”
He said jaywalking was a “perennial issue” that was difficult to police.
“We can have uniformed police officers conducting enforcement and people still will quite happily jaywalk in front of them,” he said.
