Revisiting the issue of Route 41 traffic management and bayfront connectivity proved unsatisfactory at the September 11 City Commission workshop because neither roundabouts nor signalized intersections appeared to provide relief from the traffic congestion that the community believes should be resolved at those locations. More disturbing for me was that professional staff offered no alternative options in order to deal with the unsatisfactory traffic conditions at these two intersections. So, no decisions were made about anything except to look at the de-designation issue again.
The City Commission is a policy body and not trained traffic engineers. We rely on qualified staff and consultants to give the technical advice needed for us to provide policy direction. The underlying strategic discussion that did not occur and should have occurred, if options had been produced by the staff for discussion, was description of other traffic management options which might be available to us for moving people around an increasingly urbanized downtown core.
A couple of times during the workshop, there were hints of the underlying strategic issues, but they never surfaced sufficiently to generate real discussion. The first of these is that, whether we like it or not, we must shift from a suburban model of traffic management – adding multiple lanes to downtown arteries – to an urban model which diffuses traffic through a grid rather than concentrates it on collector arterials. The second issue is that we must develop public transit that takes city dwellers and visitors out of their individual cars and puts them into widely available, frequently scheduled, attractive and convenient public transit or onto other personal mobility devices. Our existing bus system is not designed to get people out of their private cars.
We are going to have to change our approach from moving vehicles to moving people and recognize that in an urban core, movement occurs at a different pace and in different ways. Sarasota has a compact urban core which could make this relatively easy to do.
Finally, we need to come to grips with land development issues in the urban environment that generally we have not understood as beneficial. Higher densities, intensities and mixed use are appropriate to the city because that’s where it belongs in our world, – not in the suburbs. Higher urban densities and transportation oriented development will make more affordable housing available where employment occurs while reducing automobile trips, reduce gasoline usage and air pollution, reduce our carbon footprint, mitigate our current contributions to global warming, avoid urban sprawl, and prevent suburban sprawl – anybody been east of I-75 lately to any of those golf course communities?
Ken Shelin 9/21/07
