What Florence Wants
Pedestrian Safety in Florence SC: Trapped Without a Car
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Florence, SC & the Pee Dee Region
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What Florence Wants
Early Tuesday morning, September 8, 2026, 20-year-old Grace Woods was standing near the edge of Old Marion Highway, close to North Price Road, when a driver struck and killed her and left the scene. South Carolina Highway Patrol later arrested and charged 28-year-old Corey Mullins with hit-and-run and failing to fulfill a driver's duties following a fatal accident. It happened at 2:20 a.m. — dark, no reported sidewalk at that location.
It's not an isolated case. Florence and Florence County have a documented, recurring history of pedestrians killed on roads not built with foot traffic in mind, including fatal hit-and-runs on both West and East Palmetto Street in prior years.
4th
deadliest state in the nation for pedestrians
~900
pedestrian deaths statewide, 2020–2024
↑
an increase over the prior four-year period
South Carolina ranks 4th deadliest in the nation for pedestrians, according to Smart Growth America's 2026 Dangerous by Design report, released June 9, 2026. The report counted just shy of 900 pedestrian deaths statewide from 2020 through 2024 — an increase over the prior four-year period. Charleston-North Charleston ranked 12th deadliest among U.S. metro areas and Columbia ranked 18th in the same report.
We want to be precise here: that report does not single out Florence or the Pee Dee region by name. We're not going to claim a specific Florence ranking that isn't in the data.
What we can say, on the record, is that South Carolina as a whole is one of the worst states in the country to be a pedestrian in, and Florence has its own dated, named, on-the-record fatalities that fit that statewide pattern.
The pattern connects directly to earlier reporting in this series: the county is approving subdivisions and commercial growth along corridors like Highway 76 and Old Marion Highway without a systematic, published inventory of where sidewalks simply stop — or never existed.
The city's 2023 Comprehensive Plan and the county's planning department maintain planning documents that reference bicycle and pedestrian policy, but we did not find a single, current, public-facing map showing every sidewalk gap along Florence's high-speed corridors.
If that map doesn't exist yet, HelloFlorenceSC building it — road by road, from resident reports and public records — would be genuinely new information nobody else in Florence has organized.
Until those exist in one place, we're stating plainly what we know and what we don't — not filling the gap with assumption.
Have you ever tried walking or biking somewhere in Florence and found the sidewalk just... stopped? Tell us where — street name and nearest cross street — and we'll start building the map.
This piece originally cited the September 8, 2026 fatality on Old Marion Highway as its anchor incident. A second, earlier 2026 pedestrian death has since come to light: on July 15, 2026, around 10:35 p.m., a pedestrian was struck and killed on Chinaberry Road near North Price Road — in the same general area as the September incident. Two confirmed pedestrian fatalities in Florence County within two months is a stronger basis for the pattern this article describes than the single incident originally reported, and the proximity of both locations to North Price Road may be worth a dedicated follow-up.
Pedestrian dead after crash in Florence County, SCHP says — WPDE, Pedestrian hit, killed by vehicle in Florence County, troopers say — WBTW
Editor's note: This article does not claim South Carolina's statewide pedestrian-danger ranking applies specifically to Florence — the source report doesn't break it out at that level, and we say so directly rather than implying a local ranking that isn't documented.