We need a traffic czar

Here’s the real problem with traffic congestion: No one locally owns the problem. And when no one is the owner, seldom do the best outcomes occur.

So Longboat Key data guru Lenny Landau is right: Longboat Key isn’t the cause of our traffic congestion. The traffic problems are caused elsewhere — Bradenton Beach, Cortez Bridge, Cortez Road, City Island stop light, Longboat Key Club stop light, St. Armands Circle, U.S. 41 and John Ringling Causeway, John Ringling Causeway and Golden Gate Point, U.S. 41 and Fruitville Road, etc.

But no one person, no one entity carries the day-to-day responsibility of making everything work, of keeping cars moving, of managing capacity in real time.

Everyone has heard all of the local elected officials: “We can’t do anything, Gulf of Mexico Drive is a state-owned road.” … “We can’t do anything. The state controls the Gulf Drive and Cortez Bridge intersection.” … “We can’t do anything. The state controls the Fruitville and U.S. 41 intersection.”

And where is “the state” — the Florida Department of Transportation? It’s like an absentee landlord who has too many aging apartments to manage and not enough people or money to deal with the load. 

Consider this: FDOT is responsible for 43,820 miles of roads in Florida. That’s the equivalent of driving from Miami to Seattle and back six and a half times (3,300 miles per trip). Now add to that 307,532,000 miles traveled daily on those roads in a state of 20 million people. 

It’s a daunting task, to say the least. And it’s destined and sentenced not to be successful — in large part because the roads are publicly owned. 

It’s the proverbial “Tragedy of the Commons.” When the Pilgrims settled in America, they set up a communal economic system. Everyone would share and share alike.

The results were disastrous. The Pilgrims almost starved. They all thought someone else would do the work, so no one tended the crops. No one owned his food. No one took responsibility. Everyone suffered. 

When the Pilgrims converted everyone to owning a piece of property, they had a surplus of food. Ownership makes a big difference.  

Public roads are similar. We all pay gas taxes into a big pot to provide for the maintenance and construction of roads. But individual Floridians have no control or ownership over how their gas-tax dollars are spent; it’s communal money. And even though we pay those taxes, we all drive on the roads as if they are free.

Here’s more of the tragedy: When a good is perceived to be free, it is overused. Demand overwhelms supply. Cars overwhelm road capacity. Aristotle captured this phenomenon in the 300s B.C.: “That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.”

Ownership and consequences. Although every Floridian owns the roads, no one owns them. State government is the manager, maintainer, builder and allocator of gas-tax money. But in that role, the state faces few consequences for poor performance. There is no competition; FDOT will never lose its job or business.

Sure, the secretary of the FDOT could get fired, or the governor or a state representative may not be re-elected because of public outcry over roads and road  management. But rarely do you see any consequences that actually result in an expeditious elimination of traffic backups snaking from Bradenton Beach to Longboat Key, or the jams at U.S. 41, Gulfstream and Fruitville Road. 

To further complicate no one taking responsibility for congestion is how city and county roads feed into state roads. Who owns the problem? Local jurisdictions? The state?

Typically, county and city commissioners will point to what we know as the Sarasota-Manatee Metropolitan Planning Organization as the higher authority. This is the state-required bureaucracy of committees of elected officials from the two counties and all the municipalities. One of its main functions is to serve as an official liaison between FDOT and the local jurisdictions in prioritizing how FDOT funds are to be spent on local and regional transportation needs.

But with all due respect to the earnest elected officials who serve on the MPO, our best way to describe the MPO is that it’s our version of the United Nations — an ineffective, hydra-headed bureaucracy that thinks five years is moving fast and that every decision must be predicated on a high-priced study that typically ends up on a “Raiders of the Lost Ark” research shelf. Read the minutes of an MPO meeting, and you’ll want to bang your head on a table.

Or, as one MPO observer put it: “The mission of the MPO is to have a lot of meetings to make everyone on the MPO and the voters think something is actually being done … [But] they are all hung up on what can’t be done.”

Two members of the Longboat Key Revitalization Task Force — Landau and Tom Freiwald — are hoping they at least will be able to garner the backing of the MPO for ideas that could mitigate congestion immediately. The MPO agreed to put on its Jan. 23 agenda the petition the task force has been circulating (see box, above). It expresses opposition to another planned study and “respectfully demand(s)” FDOT and local officials take immediate steps to implement four ideas in key choke points.

Freiwald told the Longboat Observer on Monday it would be more effective to have the MPO behind the task force ideas than go to FDOT on their own. “We just want someone at least to try something,” Freiwald said.

Good for Landau and Freiwald. We know they — and the Revitalization Task Force — are persistent. But they also are pragmatists who know how government works (slowly and with avoidance to taking responsibility — our words, not theirs.) They, as do we, believe the region’s traffic congestion is a two-pronged issue — one that can be mitigated now with fairly easy-to-do, low-cost steps and a second prong that requires the implementation of steps over many years to address capacity and traffic management. 

Ultimately, to achieve effective results, both efforts require one leader, a traffic czar who owns the problem locally and is held accountable locally. It’s a job akin to that of schools superintendent. Elect a regional transportation authority board. Have the state allocate road money to the region as it does for schools, and then turn responsibility for roads and congestion over to a traffic czar. If road conditions remain at D or F, fire the czar.

Someone must own it.

LEE COUNTY PLAN

We have advocated this before: If the regional elected officials are serious about wanting to address traffic congestion now and for the future — and there are scant indications they are — they should 1) Go to Lee County; 2) Hire the Reason Foundation.

The Reason Foundation (Reason.org) helped Lee implement just the kind of short- and long-range plan needed in Sarasota-Manatee.

Click here to see for yourself.