A. Illegally parked eighteen wheelers. Let's ban them or limit their deliveries to nighttime, when they won't detract from our historic ambience.
B. Long, lumbering, two and three car tour trains. Let's ban them. Historic Tours of America (Old Town Trolley) has long used one car trains in downtown Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.
And, where in all of the hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on "mobility" is there any consideration of our disabled residents? There are no disabled spaces on our Bayfront and none bordering the Plaza de la Constitusion (though there are reserved spaces for taxicabs, 24/7). The number of disabled spaces has been reduced in the last year. And police don't write tickets. Why?
Posted October 22, 2017 07:46 am
By SHELDON GARDNER sheldon.gardner@staugustine.com
‘MARATHON’ TOWARD MOBILITY: City officials point to improvements, say big proposals are on tap
Christina.Kelso@staugustine.com The city plans to put electronic signs in the city and near its fringe to help drivers know when to avoid heading through town, like when the Bridge of Lions is open to boat traffic.
It’s been more than a year since St. Augustine hired a consultant to launch a mobility project, which promised to deliver a plan to fix the city’s traffic woes.
So where does the effort stand now and is the city any closer to realizing its vision of improved mobility?
While the vision is still shaping up and some delays have come along the way, officials say they are poised to make some big decisions with the community’s help, including how traffic flows on the city’s major corridors.
IN THE WORKS
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For St. Augustine, a centuries-old, European-established city, putting in bigger roads isn’t a viable option.
“We’re not expanding roads, so it becomes a traffic-demand-management problem of how we get people to where they’re going,” said Reuben Franklin Jr., the city’s mobility program manager.
To that end, tackling a large-scale problem like mobility starts with lots of small changes. For starters, more than $1 million was budgeted for upgrading parking technology and garage access, developing a website, and designing and constructing a freight delivery lot, which the city plans to borrow and then pay off using the General Fund, budget director Meredith Breidenstein said.
Vendors are now being identified for the technology upgrades, Franklin said. Officials would like to have a system in place by January 2019 that allows people to pay for their parking via a phone app, and see real-time parking capacities at the garage and other city parking, he said.
The city has increased rates in the garage and at meters, and rate changes could be ahead.
The city is also shifting its focus away from the garage a bit, moving toward a system where visitors park on the outer limits of the city during busy times and use shuttles or other transportation to come to the city’s core, City Manager John Regan said.
To further manage traffic, there are plans to put electronic message signs in the city and near its fringe, Franklin said. That will help drivers know when to avoid heading through town, like when the Bridge of Lions is open for boat traffic.
Another major focus of the mobility project is making the city more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly. There are plans for a bike-share program via a public-private partnership, Franklin said.
The biggest proposals for change are likely to come from S&ME, formerly called Littlejohn Engineering Associates. The firm has been working on recommendations for the city’s entrance corridors — San Marco Avenue, Anastasia Boulevard and King Street — that will focus in part on design, safety improvements and traffic flow.
The corridor recommendations will make up much of a mobility master plan that’s been promised since at least 2016 and that’s expected in 2018 with a lot of public input, Franklin said.
He says he’ll reach out to the public via meetings and workshops, and probably on foot, to see if people want to move ahead with the corridor ideas.
“They’re not fast projects,” Franklin said. “They’re not overnight projects. We’re looking at a five-to-10-year window.”
Just for projects officially under the “mobility” budget umbrella, the city spent or committed more than $633,000 for contracted work from late 2015 to August, according to a list provided by Franklin in September. The entire mobility budget for this fiscal year ahead is $606,715.
Mobility is really a citywide effort, so Franklin says his role is to coordinate with different department officials to keep their traffic projects on track as well as manage projects within the mobility division, such as S&ME’s work. The contract with S&ME, for all work from 2016 to Nov. 14, is for $287,195.45.
GETTING ON THE ROAD
Public outcry about traffic is nothing new, nor are efforts to try and find solutions. In fact, the city has had multiple parking and traffic studies in recent years.
In 2015, after more than a year of work, the city finished its visioning process that asked people what they wanted for the future. One of the top goals was improving mobility and putting a mobility plan in place.
After hiring a mobility coordinator in 2015, who is no longer with the city, city officials tapped Littlejohn Engineering Associates to lead the project in 2016. After collecting data, talking to people and officials for several months, Littlejohn officials delivered a framework for moving forward.
For the next phase of the project, Regan pitched using volunteers to help lead the mobility work, but commissioners opposed that idea.
So he announced in February that Franklin, formerly an engineer in the Public Works Department who led the revamp of Hypolita, Spanish and Treasury streets, would lead a new mobility division. Xavier Pellicer III would provide support as mobility coordinator.
About the same time, the city rolled out a strategic mobility plan to guide the work ahead.
Franklin has been updating the commission regularly on mobility projects he’s managing or keeping tabs on, including the revamp of the city’s residential parking program, and FDOT’s construction of the San Marco and May Street intersection upgrade, which according to the Florida Department of Transportation is set to begin Oct. 30 and end summer 2019.
Franklin also has a schedule of projects for each neighborhood in the city after taking a walk with residents to talk about traffic-related issues. Some projects have included repairing potholes and sidewalks, and creating a four-way stop.
POISED FOR CHANGE
For the goal of overall mobility, some setbacks have come. The city’s plan to add shuttle lanes on San Marco Avenue fell through because locals didn’t want to lose on-street parking. Also, the Coast Guard recently said no to a request to change the bridge opening schedule in favor of traffic, a decision the city could appeal.
Still, Vice Mayor Todd Neville believes things are where they should be now, even though it took a few years to get the right person at the helm of the project.
“We’re poised to actually have an impact on our mobility and that’s not where we were at the beginning,” Neville said.
Improving mobility will be a long-term and ongoing effort, according to Regan and Mayor Nancy Shaver.
“We have made good progress and have been engaging with the community all along the way,” said Shaver. “Improving mobility isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon, and I’m proud of what we’ve done and what we’ve learned.”
Ultimately, the city will always have more to tackle, Regan said.
“There is a workload within a given time frame, which is what you see in our mobility work, and then after that there will be new mobility challenges. It is never done,” Regan said.
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