Amid intense questions and safety concerns from Palm Beach officials, the Town Council approved waivers for the Florida Department of Transportation to work outside of the typical island hours on two projects happening now on the island.
The June 10 unanimous vote allows the state agency to move faster on the pair of projects, which are taking place in Midtown and the South End, town officials said.
But FDOT’s presentation about the projects was not met with warmth and smiles from the Town Council. Its members sharply criticized the agency for not adjusting a key element of the project after hearing an outpouring of concerns from residents and town officials.
Calling past public outreach meetings about the projects “a box to check,” Mayor Danielle Moore decried the continued inclusion of “sharrows,” markings in the travel lane that indicate that cyclists can share the road.
“It’s incomprehensible,” she said. “This is a life safety issue, in my opinion, and in the opinion of all of the residents in the South End.”
FDOT is working on two sections of State Road A1A, also named Jimmy Buffett Memorial Highway, in Palm Beach.
The south project extends from Lake Avenue in Lake Worth Beach north into Palm Beach, just north of Ibis Way. Construction on the $6 million project began May 3 and is scheduled to be completed next summer, said Mel Pollock, FDOT consultant and senior project engineer with The Corradino Group.
Construction on the $8.2 million north project began May 27 and is scheduled to be finished late next year, he said. That project runs along A1A from Emerald Beach Way, which is just south of the Southern Boulevard traffic circle and President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, north to Royal Palm Way, Pollock said. Through that area, A1A runs along South Ocean Boulevard to South County Road, and then through the heart of Midtown.
Both projects include milling and resurfacing of the roadway, work that hasn’t been done since 2008, Pollock said. Striping, signalization and lighting along both stretches will be updated, including new LED pedestrian signals at crosswalks, he said. Drainage in some areas will be improved, and new pedestrian beacons will be installed at the A1A crossings for the Par 3 Golf Course and Phipps Ocean Park, Pollock noted.
As part of the north project, road lighting will be upgraded, including the decorative lighting at Worth, Peruvian, Chilean, Australian and Brazilian avenues, he said.
While the council lauded many of those changes, they objected to the shared bicycle markings along part of the north project as unsafe, potentially life-threatening alterations to a very busy road. The sharrows that would be painted onto the roadway are considered a best practice for transportation planners to include on stretches of road where there is not enough space for a bike lane, according to FDOT guidelines.
Encouraging bicyclists to share the lane on narrow South County Road, where traffic tripled in the past year, is dangerous, council members said.
“This is not a great plan. This is a terrible plan,” Moore said.
The council, town staff and residents have opposed the shared bicycle lane repeatedly since FDOT first presented the plans, Council Member Julie Araskog said. Many of the bicyclists who ride through town do not live here, she said, and sometimes the pelotons, or groups of bicyclists, include 20 people side by side on a two-lane road.
“You basically are gonna back everybody up,” she said. “Nobody can pass. … You didn’t look at our residents at all, and I just don’t get it.”
The project feels like a blunt instrument being forced into place, Council President Bobbie Lindsay said.
“There’s a 100-year-old island community,” she said. “We can’t change the way we’re laid out. We can’t change certain things. The state is not seeing that. You seem to be blind to that.”
Council President Pro-Tem Lew Crampton said that as a South End resident who attended several public meetings, he thinks residents welcome the safety improvements near the Par 3 Golf Course and Phipps Ocean Park.
But, he said, the sharrows are just too dangerous.
“That is an invitation to disaster, and frankly, we’ve been telling you this over and over and over again,” he said.
For the past three years, town staff has shared concerns about the state’s plans with the projects’ representatives, Town Manager Kirk Blouin said. To have meeting after meeting where residents and officials expressed concerns about sharrows, and still include the sharrows in the plan, gives the appearance of a “kind of lax integrity” on the part of FDOT, he said.
“The town does not wish to have these sharrows in the middle of the road,” Blouin said, bluntly stating that while some FDOT engineers may feel that sharrows are safer, the town does not share that position. A bicyclist would have to have a death wish to try to share the lane on South County Road, he added.
Blouin also thanked state planners for making a few adjustments to the plans, including making the project a little less wide overall, and he thanked the state for the drainage improvements that will be made.
Patricia Strayer, Palm Beach’s town engineer, said she will send FDOT’s team the most recent traffic counts from a study conducted by Kimley-Horn that found that traffic doubled on the town’s major roads and tripled on South County Road north of Peruvian.
Council members also questioned the timing of the north project, which includes the portion of State Road A1A next to Mar-a-Lago. The waiver will allow contractors to work, and that portion of the project has been prioritized to be completed first because work cannot occur when Trump is in residence, Pollock said. During Palm Beach’s off-season, Trump typically does not spend as much time at his Palm Beach home.
FDOT and the contractors are working closely with the U.S. Secret Service and staff in Washington, D.C., to make sure there is “a window of opportunity” to complete the work near Mar-a-Lago, he said.
The town is working with FDOT and its contractors to develop a schedule that will be brought back to the council to review, Public Works Director Paul Brazil said. The waivers will allow FDOT more flexibility to perform some work outside of work hours to reduce effects on traffic and pedestrian safety, town staff said in a memo to the council.
Public Works will have to approve all requests to work outside of standard hours, town staff said. Requests to work outside of standard hours during the Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s holidays will not be granted, Strayer said. Most of the night work will happen in Midtown’s business district, she said.
“We’re going to try to minimize the impacts to the heavy traffic areas and not impact residential areas,” Strayer said.
Kristina Webb is a reporter for Palm Beach Daily News, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach her at kwebb@pbdailynews.com. Subscribe today to support our journalism.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: State Road A1A construction talk gets heated as Palm Beach officials object to bike focus
Reporting by Kristina Webb, Palm Beach Daily News / Palm Beach Daily News
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