Richard Clark, executive director of Monroe County Transit, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s been going on with travel in the county.
The Transportation Coordination Committee began in 2021.
Clark said, “That was the same time frame we saw the trend when we do our annual surveys of all of Monroe, all of the Keys, and we find out what’s important to all of us that live here, and it’s really where we saw that trend of transportation, in some years even take the lead and was the number one priority over affordable housing. Those two, the flip flop over the past few years. So basically, those are the two things that everyone in our community really is trying to grapple with our affordability and how we live our everyday lives, not just get in and out of the Keys, but those of us who live here just want to be able to get to and from work and grocery and school.”
Part of what the Transportation Coordination Committee has been doing is gathering surveys, listening to the public and their needs, and then figuring out how to best implement solutions.
Clark said, “It’s an incredibly important part of our process, if not the most important part of our process is reaching out to the public. You have to give the five municipally elected officials and David Rice, our county commissioner, who has spearheaded the Transportation Coordination Committee from its infancy, you have to give all of them a lot of credit. They put a lot of hours into this, a lot of thought. Went back to their respective communities, asked their fellow elected officials, hey, what’s important to you? What ideas do you have to make our roads safer, and all of this revolves around US 1 Overseas, in Key West it obviously involves North and South Roosevelt as well. We did get a lot of common themes, and it happened that way last time. So we have a tremendous amount more of multiple communities saying this is what we care about. This is what we think needs to happen. So everybody wants to see a very detailed, updated bike and pedestrian master plan, and what they’re really discussing there, and what they want to see happen is, how do we take all of these different modalities everybody’s using, the overwhelming emergence of e-bikes and the one-wheelers and how do we take all of these different ways people get around, where they all converge in certain areas, up and down the Keys, and make it safe? That’s priority one.”
The Florida Department of Transportation was also included.
Clark said, “We’re going up and down the Keys. We’re getting to and from work on all of these different ways, walking, biking, e-bike, car, what have you. How do we make everybody as safe as we possibly can, having to cross, Overseas sometimes, or come in, wherever they need to get, it’s really important that we all get on the same page. It’s also really important that it’s systemic. Part of safety is just being consistent in the way you apply things, and so you see something and okay, that tells me I need to just stay to the right. It’s the simple stuff that really work, but we need FDOT’s engagement in that. Obviously, we continue to look at inter island ferry and what that would look like in the future. Before you can ask the federal government or anyone else to help us with the costs of something like that, you really need to do the fine tuning, planning work and understand where you would go, how you would go, talk to the public. Is this something you think you want to see? All those things matter before you ever get to stage where you say, okay, let’s go get three ferries. It’s a multi year long process that’s very public, and that’s the most important thing we can do, is make sure everybody understands what we want to do. One of the things we keep hearing about is more of an intelligent transit system, transportation system where you can remotely control the lights and the flow, as opposed to have somebody standing at the boxes. So it’s safer for the sheriff’s office, he doesn’t have to have someone standing out there in an intersection and from our perspective, between AI and a human being, being able to see the flow, helping when there’s a big event at Founders Park in Islamorada or when people are trying to get all the way in to Key West, those are the things we need to make sure we can control flow a little better. Keeping the left in, left out at that hardened weigh station, you can easily do a virtual weigh station. They never have to stop, they never have to slow traffic, certainly safer for the truckers. So there’s a lot of things we want to tackle. You have to applaud FDOT and all the years that I’ve been doing this in the state of Florida, I’ve never seen a relationship as good as District 6 FDOT and Monroe County. They truly want to help. They want to know what’s important to us. They had 183 list last time. They addressed 75 of them in very short order in just a couple years. So it’s just a tremendous effort on their part, and it all really boils down to leadership. It boils down to the elected officials at all of our cities and our county, building that relationship over time, communicating. Everybody has a lot more trust on where we want to go. Everybody’s rowing in the same direction. It really helps. We have the right people focused on it. It really helps when you have the full support of your County Administrator and the members of our board saying this is where we want to go. We like the direction, go make it happen.”
How do the issues in Tallahassee affect all of this?
Clark said, “We’re wondering that same question. We’ve got an amazing government affairs director, in Lisa Tennyson, who’s just doing amazing work on behalf of Monroe County. So we are really trying to pay attention and see where they’re headed, and we really won’t know until they get back together next week. We really just won’t know. We really want certainty more than anything else. None of us want the bad stuff, but certainty is really, really important to allow us to plan for the future, and we’ll see. I’m a glass is half full, rose colored glasses kind of guy. I think we’ll be okay, I really do. You get to watch the sausage being made, that’s for sure.”
What projects are in the works?
Clark said, “We try to plan a year out as well, two years out, three years out, we’ve asked FDOT to help us. We’d really like to look at offering a similar service, Conch Connect service in Key Largo. We certainly want continuity and Islamorada and the county, we’ve been working together now for a while, trying to see how we can help them and add continuity between all of those on demand services and we actively work. I make the trek to Miami and certainly sit down here in Key West with Key West Transit. We try to talk in multiple year terms when we look to the future and we try to understand what’s going to work best, not just for today, but how do we drive people to public transit, to get them out of their cars, to get them where they want to go? It’s not rocket science. How safe is it? How convenient is it? And really, is it frequent? Is it reliable? That takes time to build that trust and change is tough too. There’s a bunch of moving pieces, but we’ve got people truly dedicated to the effort who care, on both the city level, even in Miami Dade, so everybody’s got skin in the game.”
Where do we go from here?
Clark said, “I think from here we stay the course, and we continue to offer the services we do. We don’t make dramatic change. We listen to what our citizens say they want to see and how they want services delivered. Then we work with our partners. We work with FDOT. We work with Miami Dade and Key West Transit and we see how we can deliver those services better, because you’ve already got service. So let’s figure out what can we do to optimize the services we already have? That’s really where we’re at right now. We’ve had success. That’s great. But now let’s see what we can we can do to stay on course, continue to understand what everybody says works and doesn’t work, and add to that success.”