How the beat the traffic

You don’t need me to tell you traffic congestion in Sarasota is bad and getting worse. A booming season combined with road construction or maintenance work on Interstate 75, University Parkway, Bee Ridge Road, Main Street, Coon Key Bridge and Stickney Point Bridge seems to have everyone pulling their hair out over traffic.

It’s not a problem that will go away by itself. The current transportation plan for Sarasota and Manatee counties predicts that the number of hours people spend delayed by traffic congestion will more than double in the next 20 years.  

Nor is it an easy problem to solve. There is no simple, painless way to fix congestion and improve mobility in a metro area. It takes a lot of resources and tough choices, a willingness to tolerate construction and a recognition that nothing is free to improve a regional transportation system. 

Let me start by saying we cannot significantly reduce congestion by improving public transit, bike lanes or walking paths. These modes carry less than 2% of all travel in the region, so even if we could triple that amount (which no city in the U.S. has succeeded at doing, by the way), that still would accommodate only about 6% of travel. 

Transit, biking and walking matter, but we don’t have the dense, linear corridors that could make them a significantly bigger part of the transportation system. 

To improve mobility in Sarasota, we simply must improve the system that serves virtually all travel: the roads for auto travel. 

Tolls for all roads

Now I’m sure you’ve heard, repeatedly, “You can’t build your way out of congestion, so it’s pointless to build any more roads.” This is the biggest red herring in modern transportation planning. 

Yes, in a growing metro area, if you build a new road or expand an existing one, eventually traffic fills up that new capacity, and congestion returns. But for some time congestion is reduced. 

The Texas Transportation Institute’s periodic study of congestion in the nation’s major metro areas shows those regions that add the most new road capacity see the least increase in congestion. And at the same time, the new capacity allows far more people to get where they want to go. 

Mobility improves. And yes, you may still have congestion, but more people can travel. 

As the wag said: We wouldn’t have all this congestion if people would just stop going places. Congestion is basically waiting in line to get a scarce resource — the roads — because we treat it like it is free. We pay for the roads through gas and other taxes, which the average person does not take into account when deciding to run an errand or drive to work. 

Therefore, by definition, the only solution to congestion is to price the scarce resource directly so that people take the cost into account. For example: tolls for all roads. 

Now most people prefer to keep allocating the scarce resource of roads by waiting in line rather than paying a toll, so congestion is probably with us as long as Sarasota continues to thrive.

Expand capacity

So if we are unwilling to use tolls to eliminate congestion, we must  consider how do we improve mobility, how do we improve the system so that more people can get where they want to go? Can we at least reduce and mitigate congestion?

The current long-range transportation plan for Sarasota and Manatee counties essentially is to spend millions of dollars and for congestion to get much worse. But we can spend those resources in ways that will reduce congestion somewhat and dramatically improve mobility. 

In fact, I led a team that devised alternative long-range plans to accomplish just those things for the metro areas of Atlanta, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago and, most relevant, for Miami and for Cape Coral/Fort  Myers in Lee County to the south.

Obviously, the approaches proposed in Lee County are most relevant to Sarasota. What would that mean?

First, we must expand capacity in our most congested corridors. 

There is not a lot we can do with heavily congested downtown streets beyond the improvements already underway and planned. Congestion is inherent in dense downtowns. Where we most need new capacity is on U.S. 41, Fruitville Road, Bahia Vista and Washington Boulevard. These major boulevards are how people get from one part of town to another.

Of course, adding lanes to those routes will not be easy. We would need to widen where possible. In some places, the only way to add capacity would be ugly elevated lanes or expensive tunnels. We can improve flow by improving intersections with roundabouts or adding queue jumpers, which is passing the middle lanes under or over the intersection to allow free flow through in all four directions. Not easy, cheap or pleasant, but it’s the way other large cities are expanding their road capacity.  

These boulevards and a few others are not neighborhood streets that you use to visit local friends or businesses. Nor are they freeways that you use to get from one end of town to the other. Rather they are intermediate roads that connect the major parts of town to each other. They must be designed and operated primarily to serve that purpose.

Which is the opposite of what the city’s Urban Design Studio has proposed for Fruitville and for Siesta Drive (the main access route for thousands to get on and off of Siesta Key). 

Walking and bicycle routes need to be a block to one side or the other of these major intermediate connectors, not incorporated at the cost of demoting an intermediate connector to a neighborhood street, dooming us all to much worse congestion.

Control the flow

How we operate the system is also vital. In any infrastructure network, active real-time management of flow is crucial to maximizing flow. Coordinated signal light timing substantially improves flow and reduces congestion. So does using cameras and sensors to monitor conditions in real time on major roads and bridges and intersections and via a traffic control center. That control center can operate signal lights, information alerts and deploy resources such as tow trucks to expedite clearance of incidents or traffic police to help move traffic around temporary problems. We deploy more technology to ensure the smooth flow of sewage than we do for the smooth flow of traffic!

These are just approaches and examples. Real modeling and analysis of how such projects could improve mobility and explore alternative ways to fund the projects are necessary.  

What I have proposed here is not cheap or easy. But these approaches are demonstrably effective at reducing congestion. And mobility is so crucial to our quality of life, and so central to the region’s economic prosperity, we’d be foolish not to examine every option.