Sun Sentinel: Faced with ever-increasing traffic jams, South Florida’s public officials have come up with a plan: Make it worse.
Instead of fixing the problem, government officials are deliberately adding to it in hopes we’ll all walk, ride the bus or take the train.
“Until you make it so painful that people want to come out of their cars, they’re not going to come out of their cars,” Anne Castro, chair of the Broward County Planning Council, said during a meeting last year. “We’re going to make them suffer first, and then we’re going to figure out ways to move them after that because they’re going to scream at us to help them move.”
A Sun-Sentinel analysis of South Florida’s roads and development plans reveals how planners are creating neighborhoods in urban areas where gridlock is the norm.
• Cities are approving high-density housing at a rapid pace, bringing thousands more vehicles into urban areas.
• The state Legislature has fostered the problem by allowing cities to approve development without regard for the effect on traffic.
• Some cities are deliberately reducing the number of lanes on major roads to make room for bike lanes and wider sidewalks, while cramming more cars into a smaller space.
The growing congestion in part led Broward and Palm Beach counties to ask voters to approve a penny sales tax increase in the November election. A portion of the tax would be dedicated to mass transit and other ways of getting around.
It’s a gamble. Will people ride bicycles or walk to work in South Florida’s heat, rain and lightning storms? Or ride buses that often run late and make for long, inconvenient rides?
“It’s a big experiment,” said Robert Poole, a Plantation resident and an engineer with the Reason Foundation, a public policy research group in Washington, D.C. “We won’t know for another 10 years if it’s going to work.
“If it doesn’t work, we’re going to have some big white elephants on our hands — and even worse congestion.”
Forecast: More gridlock ahead
What South Florida planners want is to create bustling urban neighborhoods, with apartments, condos, offices, restaurants and shops.
If they succeed, it will be “so busy it’s not pleasant to drive here,” said Nick Uhren, executive director of the Palm Beach Metropolitan Planning Organization. And planners say that’s a good thing, he said.
“A robust, healthy downtown is a sign of a healthy, vibrant economic community,” he explained. “[Cities] don’t want to say no to development because of traffic congestion.”
