The residents of Murfreesboro push for a better pedestrian infrastructure after people were hit and killed by train

Murfreesboro, tenn. (WSMV)-Inhabitants of Murfreesboro say that they were not surprised to see the news that a 19-year-old boy was killed on Friday by a train at the intersection of the Main Street and the entire road.

“It was a kind of boiling pot with all the pedestrians who went through this area,” Quin Sweeney Quin Sweeney in Murfreesboro told WSMV. “It's not unexpected at all.”

The police said the 19-year-old tried to cross the intersection and rose through an empty box car of a train that was stopped on the tracks. They say that he threw his bike on the second set of tracks and when he picked it up, he hit and killed him another train. According to SWEENEY, the pedestrian infrastructure is missing at the intersection and in most cases of Murfreesboro despite new growth in the city.

“Murfreesboro worked so hard to build things, but we didn't really think about how we are accommodated by our people who don't drive,” said Sweeney. “For example, the old Fort Park has built an expansion for skating and cyclists. And it is quite important that people can access the park with their bicycles when we go to a skate park. So I don't think it was difficult to predict that something like this would happen on the railway lines right next to a newly built skate park.”

SWEENEY has no driver's license and uses her bike to avoid the city. At best, she describes it as impractical and, in the worst case, “shake”. She says she has to cross the new Salem Highway to get to work every day and get from work.

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“I have to go Jaywalk on the West Main Street because it is safer for Jaywalk than going over the intersection, where people bend on the right and the pedestrian hiking signal does not work,” she said.

A few years ago, Sweeney said that she had to submit a complaint to the Tennessee Ministry of Transport to make an existing sidewalk usable.

“I submitted a complaint because the entire sidewalk was not accessible to pedestrians because he was overrun with bushes that had grown all the way outside,” she said. “This was clarified this summer, but I think we can support pedestrians more in the area than to cut just a few bushes.”

TDOT has a pedestrian security initiative with 44 active projects that aim to improve the pedestrian infrastructure across the state, but not one of these projects is in Rutherford County.

“I encourage people to turn and coordinate because Murfreesboro deserves it better,” said Sweeney. “We all earn better.”

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