This is the first time Ernst's group has been able to analyze federal fatality statistics and plot points on a map where they occurred. She was surprised to find that the roads with the most fatalities were not in dense, urban areas with lots of cars and people walking, but in suburban areas such as southern Ocean County, where she said drivers and pedestrians don't usually meet.

That raises complex questions about what can be done to improve safety. Is it merely a question of improving the roadways there? Or is it an issue of educating drivers and pedestrians to be more aware?

"Trying to figure out exactly what is happening is one of the biggest challenges," said Sarah Weissman, the program manager for the Transportation Safety Resource Center at Rutgers University. "There are all these issues and it's very, very complicated.

Weissman is working on a study of her own, titled the "Contributing Factors Study for Severe Pedestrian Crashes," which is due to be released in December. She is studying the behavioral reasons behind accidents, and she said making roads like Route 9 safer will require infrastructure improvement as well as cultural changes.

There are several projects underway to make the highway more accommodating for nonmotorists. Some of them stem from the $74 million state pedestrian safety initiative started in 2006 that provides grants for municipalities, such as the Safe Routes to School and Safe Streets to Transit programs that provide walkways, bikeways and street crossings.

In the next few years, projects to add more sidewalks, handicapped ramps and pedestrian signal activators will be finished in Lacey Township, Beachwood Township, Ocean Gate and Tuckerton, according to Department of Transportation spokeswoman Frances Daly-McCrory.

Ocean Township's administration has been discussing ambitious changes to the section of the road that will pass through its town center project, which calls for a pedestrian friendly layout. Because the project will feature businesses on both sides of the road, officials have discussed lowering the speed limit to 25 miles per hour and installing curbing and brick crosswalks to make it safer.

Other townships have cracked down on aggressive driving and failing to yield for pedestrians in an effort to change the mindsets of drivers on the highway. Tuckerton has been one of the most active police departments in terms of issuing tickets, with undercover police officers posing as pedestrians who then fine drivers who don't stop at crosswalks.

In one such sting operation in 2006, the department caught more than 52 people in a week. Called Project Target, Chief Charles Robinson said he got the idea from similar crackdowns in California, where Weissman said drivers are much more aware of the people walking the along the roadways.

"That's just kind of the culture out there," she said. "Walking is just another mode of transportation."

At the same time walking and biking from one place to another has become more convenient and possible in southern Ocean County because of development, avoiding driving has become a smart idea for other reasons - fiscally it helps save precious money on gas, and environmentally it cuts down on greenhouse gases.

For others, such as the portion of the county's growing senior population who can't drive, walking is a necessity, and for them improving driver awareness and pedestrian infrastructure can dictate their quality of life.

All these reasons make the debate not over whether to make Route 9 more friendly to pedestrians, but how to do so.

"I think what people forget about is the road is made for all users," Weissman said.

E-mail Lee Procida:

LProcida@pressofac.com