This is what Cindy Berdeguez did here the other day. Lugging plastic bags and a backpack, she frantically dashed across Semoran Boulevard, a six-lane state road where some cars and trucks whiz by at 60 miles per hour (the speed limit is 45). She paused briefly at the median and raced again. She and a friend had just left the food pantry at Catholic Charities, which sits squarely across the wide road from the bus stop.

“You’ve got to walk fast, you can’t talk and you keep your eye on the road,” she said, sweat pouring down her face. “There are no lights, no crosswalks and the bus stop is in the middle here.”

The nearest stoplight was far in the distance, too far for her to walk in the heat. So she gambled. Overhead there were no streetlights, a big problem in the evening. “Oh my God, the traffic here,” Ms. Berdeguez said. “People have no courtesy, no patience for human beings, no respect.”

At that moment, a mother grabbed her two teenage daughters and ran across the same spot. “Every day I do this,” said Nancy Tejeda, 38, shielding herself from the sun with a black umbrella. “Of course, I’m afraid. We all link arms and cross as quickly as possible. Drivers see you coming here and they speed up.”

Just down the street, the same scene played out repeatedly, only pedestrians raced across the road (where there was no median) to a neighborhood supermarket. One group included a child in a stroller. The road, like so many others, was built for cars and not people.