On Art Museum Drive in Jacksonville, the peril begins where the sidewalk ends.
The road between Atlantic Boulevard and Beach Boulevard is lined by apartment complexes and organizations that serve people with disabilities.
The sidewalks on both sides of Art Museum Drive start and stop in piecemeal fashion. In stretches where sidewalks aren’t available, people often walk in the road while cars whiz past them.
“It’s scary,” said Mary Tolbert, who lives in an apartment on Art Museum Drive and uses a walker when she goes down the road to a nearby Family Dollar store on Beach Boulevard. “Scary that the cars are going to hit me.”
A grass-roots movement a few years ago caught the attention of city leaders who agreed to fill in the missing gaps so the sidewalks will run continuously between Atlantic and Beach boulevards.
But as the city moves to finally start design in the coming year and then construction in 2028, the $7.5 million price tag for 1 mile of sidewalks has made it a target of critics.
“Donna’s waste is everywhere,” City Council member Rory Diamond wrote June 15 in an X post referring to Mayor Donna Deegan and the sidewalk project.
Diamond’s post echoes criticism by Gov. Ron DeSantis and his Department of Government Efficiency in a January report that listed “$7.5 million for a single, 1-mile sidewalk project” as an example of excessive spending in Jacksonville.
Florida DOGE did not identify the location of the sidewalks. Diamond said it is the Art Museum Drive project.
Florida DOGE said the price tag is eight times the state Department of Transportation’s typical cost of $900,000 for 1 mile of sidewalks on both sides of a road.
“No stretch of sidewalk is worth that much money, especially when you’ve got all these other ones across the city,” Diamond said. “I’m a big fan of infrastructure and spending money on it, but you’ve got to be smart.”
Why the Art Museum Drive sidewalk project costs $7 million
City spokesman Phillip Perry said the sidewalk construction will make Art Museum Drive a safer corridor in a growing part of Jacksonville, and the higher cost of the project stems from the need to modify the bottom of an overpass so there is room for sidewalks where Art Museum drive goes under the overpass.
“It’s yet another example of the councilman and state officials deliberately misrepresenting a project to promote their false, hyper-partisan narrative,” Perry said. “It’s disappointing to see any elected official classify a project designed to keep people safe as wasteful.”
The modification of the overpass will cut back portions of the concrete-covered abutments beneath it so there is space for the sidewalks. New vertical walls will be built to reinforce the sloping abutments.
Diamond said he’s supported programs for people with disabilities but he wants to know whether city officials considered alternatives that could cost less than $7.5 million.
“They just said OK, this is what it costs to do this and let’s just throw money at it,” he said.
The current schedule for construction in 2028 would be almost a decade after CIL Jacksonville spearheaded a petition drive and held meetings in 2019 calling on the city to fix the existing sidewalks and construct new sections.
How missing sidewalks make Art Museum Drive dangerous
“We think it’s an accident waiting to happen,” said Jose Morales, ADA manager for CIL Jacksonville, a nonprofit on Art Museum Drive that helps people with disabilities. “We’ve always thought that and we’ve always argued that.”
Morales and two of his co-workers experience on a daily basis what it’s like to deal with the lack of sidewalks when the legally blind men walk a few blocks from CIL Jacksonville to eat lunch at the Sandwich House at the corner of Beach Boulevard.
They go through the parking lot of an office building until they hit a spot where the grassy roadside has such a steep slope that they continue single file in the outside part of a vehicle lane.
Morales said in addition to CIL Jacksonville, Art Museum Drive is home to a Florida Division of Vocational Rehabilitation office that helps people with disabilities find jobs, the city of Jacksonville’s Social Services Division that provide an array of assistance, and the Jacksonville district office for the Florida Division of Blind Services.
“Not having an accessible pathway here means you’re literally not giving access to people who are supposed to depend on the services you’re already spending money on,” Morales said. “It’s counterproductive.”
Teri Duke, equipment distribution coordinator of CIL Jacksonville, said she even after working 18 years for the organization, she still holds her breath when she sees people in the road that drivers “think is a speedway.”
“I don’t have sidewalks on the street that I live on, but there’s not that much traffic, right?” she said. “It’s a little side road. But this is an extremely dangerous street. I’ve been here a long time and I’ve seen so many close calls.”
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Why a $7M sidewalk could save lives on one dangerous Jacksonville road
Reporting by David Bauerlein, Jacksonville Florida Times-Union / Florida Times-Union
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By David Bauerlein, Jacksonville Florida Times-Union | USA TODAY Network
