- April 18, 2024
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Three construction projects are likely to affect traffic on Florida Park Drive, and the city has decided to delay further studies on the traffic’s impact on Florida Park Drive residents until the projects are over.
The projects are the Interstate-95 interchange at Matanzas Woods Parkway, the renovation of Holland Park and the renovation at the Palm Harbor Shopping Center, soon to be renamed Island Walk. All of the work is scheduled to be completed in less than two years, with the interchange scheduled for 21 months.
“I think if we’re going to do (traffic study on Florida Park Drive) again, it would be good to have all three of those events completed,” City Councilman Bill McGuire said during a City Council meeting June 16. “The opening of the interchange up at Matanzas and I-95 will change driver behavior.”
McGuire made a motion to have the council reconsider an option for further study — which would be done by a firm that could study not only the street’s engineering, but also its impact on resident health — after the construction is completed. His motion passed the council without objection.
An option for further traffic engineering study, to be performed by Lassiter Transportation Group for about $42,000, was not recommended by city staff and had already died for lack of a motion at the meeting before McGuire made his motion.
The proposed Lassiter study would have differed from the city’s study by tracking not only how much traffic there was at various points and its speed, but also where it went: Lassiter would have used license plate tracking or Bluetooth technology tracking to follow the routes taken by individual cars.
Florida Park Drive, which is traveled by about 5,100 and 8,200 vehicles per day, has for years brought resident complaints about high traffic volume.
But its level of service has been measured at various points in the road as between a level A and a level C, none of which are considered unacceptable on the A-through-F level of service scale, according to a study performed by city staff and presented at a June 9 workshop. That left the City Council undecided on how to proceed.
At the June 16 meeting, Netts asked city engineer Sean Costello to describe what a C-rated level of service looks like.
That level of service, Costello replied, is “Where you’re able to maintain the speed limit, and the amount you have to stop is still minimal. You’re only stopping when somebody has to make a turn.”
Florida Park Drive resident Steve Carr, the muscle behind much of the effort to push the city to address the perceived problem, said the rating said nothing about the traffic’s impact on resident lives.
“All traffic studies should focus on wellbeing, not just traffic,” he said. “Right now we have thousands of cars, hundreds of trucks passing down Florida Park Drive. … Yes, we can count the number of cars, but what is it doing to the people? That’s what we need to know.”
Carr suggested eliminating cut-through traffic that uses residential F-section streets to travel between Palm Harbor Parkway and Palm Coast Parkway.
Another F-section resident suggested the city add signs on either end of Fleetwood Drive that would restrict that street to local traffic. He said the constant rush of cars and exhaust creates dust. “The dust is just terrible,” he said. “I don’t have a man cave; I have a landfill, is what it amounts to.”
But City Manager Jim Landon said the city wouldn’t be able to enforce signs restricting certain roads to residents, because people who ignored the sign wouldn’t technically be violating the law.
City Councilman Steven Nobile said the information he had from the city’s traffic study didn’t tell him enough.
“I want to get to the level of determination of, is this something that is inconvenient for the residents of Florida Park Drive? Or is this something that’s a problem? ... Is there a health issue that we’re perpetuating by allowing it to continue?”
The council directed city staff to research firms that would be able to measure the traffic’s impact on resident health and could be called on for a future study after the three projects that could affect Florida Park Drive’s traffic are completed.
