City reveals vision for reimagined Main Street

Walking along Main Street from School Avenue to Gulfstream Avenue, effectively end to end through downtown, Sarasota’s main drag presents a schizophrenic array of personalities.

The east end is utilitarian. The middle portion a mix of new and future high-rise residential properties with a sprinkling of restaurants, boutiques, office buildings and a church. The west end, meanwhile, features the highest concentration of restaurants, bars and retail shops that has evolved into downtown’s center of activity.

As west end vibe continues to expand gradually eastward, how does the city plan for a future that coalesces the dozen or so disparate blocks into a single, cohesive design that not only lends a sense of place, but better accommodates the mix of mobility modes that traverse the city’s ever-redeveloping core?

Enter the Main Street Complete Street visioning concept presentation, held Dec. 17 by the city of Sarasota at the Selby Public Library. It was the next step in a multiyear process to convert Main Street into a more multimodal-friendly environment, aesthetically reflective of the Main Street’s evolving personality.

The Main Street reimagining is among the top 10 priorities identified in the city’s Sarasota In Motion plan. City staff has workshopped, surveyed and otherwise engaged the public in bringing the vision to this point with much more work yet to be done.

“We had a survey that received over 1,500 responses, which really helped us take a look at how we would develop the concepts,” Chief Transportation Planner Alvimarie Corales told the Observer. “Not only did the survey help us create those concepts, we also had from the workshop a lot of really good information of what they wanted to see. And then we also had two open houses and attended a couple of community events that really helped us get more survey responses and also feedback on the project.”

The top five priorities from community input are outdoor spaces, more shade, more lighting, space for outdoor dining and attractive landscaping.

“A lot of these priorities overlap. If you have a wider sidewalk, you're able to accommodate a better landscaping area and create those public spaces that people would like to have,” Corales said. “And with every infrastructure improvement, you definitely need to include the lighting and you need to improve drainage.”

To account for the varying uses along Main Street, seven segments and corresponding scheduling priorities divide the visioning. Segment 1A, for example, between School Avenue and East Avenue will probably come last because that is the area undergoing the most change from outdated uses as well as potential changes to Sarasota County Jail. 

To accommodate the wider sidewalks, some segments will eliminate parking on one side of the street or convert angled spaces to parallel parking. Consistent throughout the block-by-block facelift will be materials used for sidewalks and hardscapes, trees and other plantings, lighting and other amenities.

A balance in parking reduction against the desires of merchants and restaurants to maintain as much parking as possible in proximity to their places of business. Parking will be reduced to accommodate other priorities, but Corales said survey results suggest parking a distance away and walking is not a deterrent.

“One of the survey questions that we asked was how long would they be willing to walk. About 60% of respondents said that they would be willing to walk more than 30 minutes,” Corales said. “In a parking study what we saw was that the garages were not even up to 70% of capacity.” 

All garages throughout downtown, she added, are within 30 minutes of any destination within the central business district, and typically closer than that.

That's not to forget the Bay Runner trolley, she added, which provides free rides and multiple stops along the length of Main Street with service averaging about every 20 minutes. 

Next steps

None of this will happen in the short term, though. The Main Street Complete Streets project is currently unfunded. State and federal grant applications require a project to be at the 30% design phase before submission.

A planning consultant is on board, so once the Sarasota City Commission accepts the visioning, actual design can begin to move forward with more opportunities, Corales said, for future community involvement.

Planning and design will take two years and not all at once, but in segments. And even if all went perfectly, the Main Street Complete Street won’t be complete until perhaps the end of the next decade. 

Case in point: planning for the roundabout at U.S. 41 and Fruitville Road, which opened in 2020, began in 2004.

“Transportation projects are very slow,” Corales said. “If you go through the federal process, it can take 15 years for a project from the planning stages all the way to construction.”