Dan Lobeck: They call it “Sarasota In Motion” but it really proposes “Sarasota In Gridlock.”
They call it “Sarasota In Motion” but it really proposes “Sarasota In Gridlock.”
The pro-developer Sarasota City staff is trying to slip through a terrible plan under cover and distraction of the raging pandemic.
It would embrace traffic congestion with road diets, the ending of road improvements and a revived gutting of the Transportation Chapter to repeal traffic studies by developers and other controls on congestion.
Please attend and speak (by socially distanced video), per the directions above, or email the City Commissioners at Email to City Commissioners.
It’s too important not to care
Tell Them To Not Adopt the “Transportation Master Plan”
The City Commission should not vote to “Adopt” staff’s so-called “Transportation Master Plan” as they are requesting this Monday afternoon (and not vote to Approve, Endorse or Implement it either).
Instead, the Commission should either reject it, defer it or just receive it (so as to allow continuing consideration of the parts that have some merit, without committing to all of it) and move on.
Adopting a Plan is like adopting a child. Any Commissioner who votes for it will own it and will be responsible for it forever.
Sarasota City Commissioners deserve a better record and legacy than this.
It’s Not “Multimodal” When the Biggest Mode is Maligned
The Plan is fatally flawed, as described below. It is a dangerously irresponsible scheme—pushed by staff for decades despite repeated public and Commission rejections – to embrace traffic congestion, to somehow force everyone out of their cars to walk and bike everywhere they need to go, or ride buses that get caught in traffic too.
While some of the proposed projects — bike lanes, streetscapes, a water taxi, more buses, etc., are very nice (if there is enough money, while meeting other needs), the Plan is not “multimodal” or “Master” in any sense.
It is instead openly contemptuous of the personal automotive form of transportation which provides 82 percent of all trips by City residents today (see the note below on that) and continues to be important.
Lack of Needed Data
The City Commission and the public are being given incomplete, one-sided and misleading information by staff and its consultant, apparently to limit scrutiny as well as opposition.
There is no estimated cost for each of the 40 projects Commissioners are being asked to approve and prioritize as stated for the next 25 years – only a total of $118.4 million.
There is also no comparison of the cost of the 40 projects over 25 years to the transportation revenue projected over that time, although given the large amount it appears to soak up all of that revenue for the listed projects, leaving nothing for any road improvements that may be identified and needed.
As one Commissioner has observed, there is not even any data presented about where people are driving and how often, and what are the past and projected trends. This for what is supposed to be a 25-year Master Transportation Plan. That is because, simply put, this Plan ignores drivers, apart from seeking to making driving more difficult.
Not Right to Adopt a Major, Disputed Policy During a Pandemic
Also, consider this: The City Commission is being asked to make one of the most important decisions they will ever make, with huge consequences for their constituents, during a raging pandemic and in the summer, when public attention and participation are limited.
That’s just not right.
Nothing for Drivers
The list of 39 projects are all for walking, biking and mass transit. While many of those projects have merit, some of us also drive from time to time. The only road improvement is last at #40, to someday (apparently in 2045, if any money is left), widen a portion of South Tamiami Trail.
The Plan would even deliberately make traffic congestion worse, by “road diets” to shrink stretches of 12th and 10th Streets from four to two lanes and remove a lane on 17th Street.
When after one workshop I asked Dr. Jason Collins, the staff’s chief consultant, why the listed projects omit road improvements, he asked what I meant by that. I responded, “Added road capacity, even one new turn lane.” He replied, “I don’t consider those to be road improvements.” So goes the contempt for the car, and all who drive them. Roads are improved only if they are shrunk.
Problematic Projects
Other projects in the Plan make no sense, such as using a lane on the Ringling Bridge for buses and bicycles only. When asked at a Commission meeting what would happen if a bus encounters a bicycle in the lane, staff said the bus would slow down for the bike in front of it and follow it all the way. Really?
Another project, that is many so-called “protected” bike lanes separated from the road with curbs, has been justly criticized as hazardous at intersections and less safe than striped lanes, by Mike Lasche, a noted bicyclist and pedestrian advocate, who has presented compelling studies to Commissioners to back that up. The bike lane curbs, he notes, also impair accessibility across streets by the disabled. These points and data deserve to be studied before staff’s position is adopted. Mike Lasche, although a walking and bicycle advocate, also objects to the proposed Plan because it is hostile to driving, believing that all modes of transportation should be accommodated.
The Commission vote requested on Monday would also revive staff’s 647-page Transportation Chapter rewrite, which the City Commission rejected in 2016, to eliminate road improvements, traffic studies by developers, monitoring of traffic congestion and other respect for drivers. Do Commissioners really want that struggle all over again? Why should staff get a second shot at really bad policy changes they could not get through the Commission four years ago?
Deception
The report claims to reflect public opinion, as if most of us want traffic gridlock, but does so by twisting rigged surveys. As one example, it omits a result in their surveys that 82 percent of all trips in the City are by automobile but reports that among walking, biking, buses and “driving alone” (yes, alone), only 48 percent said they mainly do the latter, as proof that driving is not so important.
As another example, staff presents traffic data in recent years only on a several-block segment of 10th Street to demonstrate that traffic is not really getting worse and can therefore be disregarded. However, that segment is not representative, in part because 10th Street is not a full east-west route and as such does not carry as much traffic as other arterial roads. When staff presented that data and claim to the Planning Board on June 10, Vice Chair Kathy Kelley Ohlrich objected for the reasons stated, saying, “I would have chosen a different street” to provide valid data. That objection is curiously not mentioned in the otherwise detailed draft minutes of that meeting prepared and presented by staff.
At workshops, everything was geared toward staff’s predetermined outcome (projects were ranked based on criteria that all favored non-automobile travel) and public comment was constrained, even prohibited.
A History of Ignoring Repeated Rejection of This Scheme by the Commission and the Public
Again, this Plan is to finally implement an insane scheme pushed for decades by City staff to somehow force everyone out of their cars to walk and bike wherever they need to go, and take buses that get caught in traffic too – even though that’s not practical for most trips by most people most times.
On April 28, 2015, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune quoted transportation engineer Alex Davis Shaw as stating for the City at a workshop, “It’s going to take some congestion and some discomfort before people make a choice to do something other than get in their car.” The article then states as follows:
It would cost $80 million to increase the capacity of city roads that are currently graded “F,” signifying the worst conditions, according to the engineers’ report. City Manager Tom Barwin said that the city may want to instead adjust its way of thinking and accept certain conditions as normal. “People always think, from school, that ‘F’ is failure. But it’s really a sto p-and-go, intense level of urban traffic.”
This embrace of traffic gridlock by City management and staff has long included schemes for “road diets” to shrink major arterial roads in the City from four to two lanes. It began in 2004 with staff’s push to do that on all of Bayfront Drive (US 41 from John Ringling Causeway south to Selby Gardens), to make the road “more bicycle and pedestrian friendly.” That caused a public uproar, formation of a citizens’ movement called “Mobility Now” to oppose it and defeat at a contentious City Commission meeting.
But staff would not give up on its unpopular road diets. It pushed the scheme again for several years for Fruitville Road downtown, leading to vocal rejection by four of five City Commissioners on April 16, 2019. Even then, staff continued to seek a federal grant to help fund that road diet, in the hopes that if awarded (it was not), the Commission might reconsider.
Now this Plan by staff seeks road diets – using that very phrase – on 10, 12th and 17th Streets, despite the fact that staff projects (without referencing any data) that north Trail will experience the most increase in traffic and such east-west disconnected streets present at least some potential that might be considered to improve the street grid.
Similarly, Commissioners rejected a 2008 “paradigm shift” to no longer control traffic congestion in new development, that was announcemd to the press by City staff, with then Commissioner Kelly Kirschner retorting in an email, “What’s this ‘paradigm shift’? I never approved that.”
Staff just will not give up on being the tail that wags the dog on City policy, or in a similar analogy, a dog that won’t let its master take away its bone. Consider that it has been over 13 months since the City Commission voted to direct City staff to prepare and present a proposal to increase setbacks in new downtown developments. Staff opposes that change. It has therefore been buried, in direct defiance of the City Commission’s order.
This contempt for the car and everyone who drives one is reflected in a draft report on parking in The Bay project, now that underground garages have been deemed too expensive. The asphalt-to-greenspace plan which has been the main appeal of The Bay project is now instead to be achieved by reducing parking on the 53 acres from 1,427 spaces to 473 – a two-thirds reduction – despite increasing the seating for performing arts by 25 percent and adding other attractions. This begins in the pending Phase One with a proposal to almost entirely eliminate a parking lot that served the old GWiz center (and former library) and which staff acknowledges is used heavily by Van Wezel patrons. The draft report to cut parking at The Bay by two-thirds says the reduced parking will be solved by the same sort of “alternative” modes of transportation pushed in this Master Transportation Plan.
Again, just crazy. The City should be solving transportation problems, not creating them.
“Move People”, But Not Their Major Form of Transportation
The mantra, which staff even wrote into the Transportation Chapter of the City’s Comprehensive Plan many years ago, is “Move people not cars.” As if people don’t use cars to move most of the places they need to go. [Staff later claimed in a report (after I began making the point just stated) that the Chapter reads, “Move people not just cars,” but that’s false – the word “just” is not in there – you can look it up].
The local Observer newspaper ran an editorial by Matt Walsh criticizing this proposed Master Transportation Plan on May 27, 2020, stating:
If City Manager Tom Barwin and the city planning staff had their way, they would have everyone walking or riding a bike or a trolley. That’s not really much of an exaggeration. … But it’s still a reality that the people visiting and living up on the barrier islands will need to use their cars to go to restaurants, shops, theaters and doctor appointments, as well as to run from approaching hurricanes.
And it’s not just barrier island residents. I live downtown, for example, at Ringling and Osprey. While we often enjoy walking on Main Street, there is no way we would walk all the way to the Van Wezel, or to Lido Beach or to many other Sarasota destinations. Or for trips going through and then outside the City. We’ve used a car for all of those trips and will continue to do so.
I know that City staff seems to have contempt for us for having that choice, but like almost all other Sarasotans, it is a choice that makes sense for us and which we will keep using – despite staff’s best efforts to take it away by making driving difficult.
I also doubt that clients of my law firm will walk, bike or take a bus to my offices. Gridlock does not well serve businesses any more than it serves residents, no matter what City staff and their consultants may say.
Some suggest that switching from driving to walking and biking will attract people to downtown multifamily housing. Consider the following quote from a housing expert in the February 17, 2020 Sarasota Herald-Tribune:
Further, there appears to be a migration occurring within Sarasota, with tenants moving from downtown Sarasota to its suburbs, in order to escape the increased congestion.
It simply needs to be recognized that people drive and that their needs cannot be disregarded in any sound, sane transportation policy for the City.
The City Manager was quoted in the Sarasota Herald Tribune on January 22, 2020, as saying about the severe traffic congestion between the barrier islands and downtown Sarasota, “Look on the bright side. It’s a beautiful view from the Ringling Bridge. Try to practice driving yoga.”
It is to be hoped that our City Commissioners take a less benign view of traffic congestion.
We Need an “All of the Above” Transportation Plan
The City should assist pedestrian and bicycle transportation, and support mass transit (particularly for those who need it due to economic, disability or age reasons). However, the City should not resolve to make things worse for drivers by road diets and neglect, and instead should seek to identify and fund sensible road improvements in addition to alternative modalities, rather than ruling them out for decades and beyond.
At the final workshop on this Plan, one citizen asked, “How will you improve my ability to drive a car?” Jason Collins’ response was simply, “What we hear is that people want different choices.” Well, there is no need for a choice which rules out an accommodation of drivers and makes it more difficult for the 82 percent of trips that are by car in order to serve only travel on foot, by bike or by bus.
City residents and businesses deserve an “all of the above” approach to transportation. A Transportation Plan which is truly multimodal and inclusive, as any Master Plan must be.
As a City homeowner/resident and business owner, I do not look forward to a City-sponsored return to worsening traffic gridlock when the pandemic abates.
Please tell the City Commission: Do not Adopt staff’s proposed “Transportation Master Plan.”
There is most certainly a better way.
Let’s urge our City Commissioners to do the right thing, and act as leaders for sensible City policies and not just as servants of their staff and local development interests.
Thank you.
Dan Lobeck, Esq.
For Control Growth Now, as its President