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 Thanksgiving holiday means no construction will be scheduled on the roads from Thanksgiving Day through Saturday.
Clark said, “So those three or four days, we won’t have anybody out there working on the roads, which is nice, but the state’s finishing up that work there at Roosevelt and Bertha. They did some stuff last night, early this morning, connecting water mains, things like that. So that’s going to continue. The pump station work is going to continue. But as soon as that’s done, they’re really going to take a hard look at the triangle and see what, if anything, they can do to help the flow through that particular junction, if you will, where, obviously everybody wants it to flow better. I don’t know there is a solution, but people much smarter than you or I will take a hard look and the engineers will see if there’s a way to make it flow even better. So that’s good. Then those folks coming into the Keys, there is some work up there along the stretch from that Jew Fish Creek Bridge area. So, getting into the Keys is going to slow a little bit and then we still have those single lane closures at the Channel Five Bridge. It’s mostly nighttime stuff, but still a really good reason to slow down.”
Bus stops will also be looked at in the new year.
Clark said, “We had a long process, a very public process, at looking at what our priorities are for the entire county and all of our municipalities. We started that process again. We had 183 projects that were discussed, and we ranked them according to how many people said the same thing, which makes perfect sense. Those areas that people want the most to be done, that’s where we focus. So we came up with 12 primary, meaning those are the ones everybody agreed upon, those are the ones everybody wanted to see done, and the two remaining of the 12, all the others have been addressed, which is great are that work on Roosevelt that we just discussed, and that can’t be done until the Bertha stuff is completed. The other is the county wide bus stop effort, and we started that process this October, getting everything together, making sure we were looking at the right things, setting up a structure so that everything’s normalized, which is really important.”
The next step is looking at criteria.
Clark said, “We’ll build some and it’ll determine whether or not the bus stop warrants a shelter, maybe a sign, maybe a bench, figure out what it warrants. Or maybe no one’s using that particular shelter. What we really are striving to do is to get rid of people standing on the side of the road hailing a bus down when there’s no stop, and it’s very unsafe and those people getting on and off the bus, it’s unsafe. There’s people behind the bus, it’s unsafe. So we really need to take a really hard look at that and it will determine, okay, this is where our busses are going. This is where they’re going to stop. This is where we’re bringing people, which leads into as we expand our Conch Connect local system, we need to make sure we have good access to those points. So they mean a lot more than simply getting out of the elements, it means a lot more than that.”
Then the priority list will be discussed.
Clark said, “We had 24 secondary priorities. We need to look at that list again and then the remaining, say 100, we’re going to go back through and start all over and do a very public process. We have elected officials from the county and each municipality on our Transportation Coordination Committee. We’re going to be out talking to people, encouraging folks to give us their input on what they’d like to see the priorities be for the Keys, and then we will take that and formally present it to FDOT, who is an amazing partner in this effort. They know we know our roads better than they do and so when we come up with a list of priorities, and we’ve done a very public process and our elected leaders have signed off on it, those are the priorities FDOT are going to try to pursue. If the future is anything like the past, they’re going to through the entire list that we give them.”
Transportation also plays a big part in the ROGO decision making process.
Clark said, “We’re going to operate within the bound that the commission and our municipalities choose. They’re going to go to Tallahassee and let Tallahassee know this is what we feel works best. Tallahassee we hope will, of course, sign off on it and allow us to move forward from that. From my perspective, from a transit perspective, I’m always trying to alleviate in any way, shape, form or fashion, any kind of constraint. So the more public transit we can have, the fewer places we’re going to have that congestion. Public transit includes making sure we build bike paths and places for people to walk and bike and it’s the whole reason why we’re focused on inter island ferry service. How do we get people to find other modes of transit than climbing in a car? So we’re always going to try to push that.”
Will Conch Connect be expanded?
Clark said, “We continue to make it better. We learn something every month as we look at where people are getting on and off and how they’re using the system. This is going to be our first season, so we’ll really see some numbers and demographics change after Christmas. December 26 hits, and everything changes. So we’re going to take a really good look and see what we need to do. We may have to deploy a little differently and that’s all just knowledge. You have to figure out how people are using it, or want to use the system. Then we’re certainly looking at growth. We really want to take a look at Key Largo in the Upper Keys and see how that system would work. Obviously, every community is going to operate a little differently. Islamorada uses Freebee. They operate with some different hours and different use. So we want to make sure that we help those people the way they want to be helped. We have to make sure our service is delivering in a way that the residents can use the service and will use the service.”
Public communication is important.
Clark said, “Continue to communicate with us. We don’t know what we don’t know. Any chance anyone gets to say if we just did this, we have lots of folks who have been asking us about a smaller expansion in the Lower Keys, as well as how we’re going to handle growth going up the Keys. That stuff’s important to us, and so I just encourage folks to continue to reach out. That’s the one thing I have learned about living here. Those of us who live here aren’t shy about letting us know how they feel.”
The Seven Mile Bridge will certainly be a discussion as we move into the new year.
Clark said, “We’re just year one of a three year planning exercise, so that’s going to be another very public process that FDOT and its contractors are looking at. They did get a really nice $66 million grant from the federal government for Long Key Bridge. They need to get into the design of that bridge. But it’s already north of $850 million for that bridge. We have a couple, two, three more years before we would see any, any significant, if any construction, I would say somewhere in the early 2030s for that bridge. But these bridges are going to be very robust, and as it as always happens, as time goes, they just seem to get more expensive.”