Lines Drawn Again As Clearwater Council Debates Drew Street Redesign

CLEARWATER, FL — Efforts to redesign Drew Street to increase safety hit another roadblock during the Clearwater City Council’s work session Monday when a debate erupted over whether the project should go forward after all.

After hearing from a steady stream of residents in April who urged the council to adopt the Florida Department of Transportation’s complete streets plan for Drew Street, council members voted to move forward with the project designed to slow traffic and improve safety.

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Also known as a “road diet,” complete streets plans call for converted an existing four-lane undivided road into a three-lane road with a center left turn lane. Road diets have proven to reduce crashes by 19 to 47 percent, reduce rear-end collisions and left-turn crashes due to the dedicated left turn lane, reduce right-angle crashes since drivers coming from side streets no longer have to cross four lanes of traffic, allow rooms to install refuge islands, wider sidewalks and bike lanes, produce more consistent vehicle speeds and better accommodate all users of the road, according to the Federal Highway Administration.

Shortly following the council’s vote to move ahead with the road diet for Drew Street, members of Amplify Clearwater, an organization made up of downtown Clearwater business owners, appealed to Sen. Ed Hooper, R-Palm Harbor, to delay the project until further traffic studies can be done.

“We took a vote and then there was behind-the-scene maneuvering by people, including Amplify Clearwater, to put language into the state budget that stopped this (the complete streets project) dead in its tracks,” said council member Mark Bunker. “I kind of resent that. Safety trumps everything except when the business community wants to make a few extra bucks. We took a vote and said the safety of the folks who live on Drew Street is the most important thing. These people have been fuming for years and haven’t gotten any help from the city.”

Amplify Clearwater members are concerned that reducing the capacity on Drew Street will force drivers onto alternate road, resulting in a loss of business.

Clearwater Mayor Brian Aungst said a delay in the complete streets plan might not be a bad idea. It would give the city time to verify if the studies done by the FDOT on the project are accurate.

“The biggest frustration for our staff is we aren’t getting information from the FDOT in a timely manner,” he said. “We need to see if the numbers and data we were told about in modeling the complete street plan is correct, is accurate or if it’s dated.”

Will Blanton, executive director of Forward Pinellas, the county’s land use and transportation planning agency, said FDOT engineers have repeatedly stated that the redesign of Drew Street will have no impact on surrounding Clearwater roads.

However, the FDOT study is several years old, said Aungst Since then, the city has completely remodeled Coachman Park and added an amphitheater that can accommodate 10,000 people, said Aungst. Additionally, last fall Clearwater voters approved the sale of city property around Coachman Park for a development that will include a hotel, housing and retail.

Aungst said those projects put the FDOT’s data into question.

“No doubt the data is dated,” he said, noting that the county’s own consultant, Mead & Hunt Engineering, believes the amount of traffic was underestimated because the new development wasn’t taken into account.

“That why why we have to do another study and check this out,” he said. “I am not trying to stop this. I am tring to ensure we do this correctly out of the gate.”

He said he was mayor in 1999 when the city decided to install a roundabout in Clearwater Beach to regulate the mass of traffic headed to the beach. However, the $1.7 million roundabout proved a diseaster from the moment it opened. A decorative fountain in the center of the roundabout sprayed the cars driving through the roundabout and the roundabout itself confounded drivers.

“We had to hire an expert from Australia, flew him in and put him up in a hotel for two weeks,” said Aungst. “The consultant recommended starting from scratch, demolishing the roundabout and its fountain and redesigning it to be easier to navigate. The cost to us was a significant amount of money, at least a couple of million dollars.”

He said he doesn’t want a repeat performance when the Drew Street complete streets plan is built.

To get a better idea of the results of complete streets projects, Aungst said he decided to check out FDOT complete streets projects completed or underway in other parts of the state, including Orlando, St. Petersburg, Lakeland and Gainesville.

Orlando transportation planning projects manager, Gus Castro, told Aungst that the 2008 Edgewater Drive complete streets project has been successful, slowing down traffic and improving safety. But he added that Edgewater is a collector roads. He said he would hesitate to do a complete streets redesign on a through street like Drew Street that carries traffic downtown.

St. Petersburg transportation and parking manager, Evan Mory, said St. Petersburg’s complete streets redesign for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street in 2019 is the single most difficult thing he’s dealt with in his 16 years on the job and St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch said he gets complaints about the complete streets redesign on a daily basis. Welch said the businesses feel they’ve lost customers because drivers are using alternative streets to avoid the narrower complete streets project.

All of the transportation managers recommended that Clearwater conduct a pilot project before adopting a complete streets plan, said Aungst. He noted that the project’s design is only 10 to 15 percent complete so it’s not too late to do a pilot.

“Let’s verify what having 10,000 people coming downtown for a show at the amphitheater does to the traffic counts,” he said. “They (the FDOT) can start the project at the end of next year and we shouldn’t lose any (state or federal) funding.”

He also suggested doing corridor studies on other Clearwater roads to see the impact of the complete streets project on them. One model showed that, in 2045, it will take 156 minutes to drive down U.S. 19 from Osceola Avenue to Drew Street, he said.

Council member Kathleen Beckman, however, said delaying the project would be a mistake. Drew Street residents take their lives in their hands every day when they pull out of their driveways, ride their bikes or take an evening stroll down their street.

“To bring it up at the last hour as a hail Mary is ridiculous,” she said. “This should have been considered five years ago, not when we’re ready to put a shovel in the ground next June.”

She said the FDOT engineers have repeatedly assured the council that they took the increased traffic from Coachman Park and the Bluffs Project in consideration when it concluded that Clearwater roads won’t be significantly impacted by the complete streets project.

“Now we’re second guessing our state agency. Why don’t we value the opinions of the experts who say Gulf to Bay (boulevard) and other roads can handle the traffic? For some reason we choose not to believe them at the last minute and this will cost the city,” she said, adding that she was told the design was much further along than 10 to 15 percent. “FDOT hopes to have the design complete by the end of year so construction can begin on june 24. To interrupt the design now is foolish. Do we want to sacrifice safety and human lives to maintain the status quo of Drew Street?”

Beckman said the information Aungst brought back from Orlando after speaking with Castro justifies moving ahead with the project. Since Orlando finished its Edgewater Drive complete streets project, accidents have been reduced by 42 percent although no capacity was taken off the road. Injury accidents fell by 71 percent and the number of bicyclists and pedestrians increased by 12 percent.

As for Amplify Clearwater’s concerns, Beckman said 77 new businesses opened on Edgewater drive after the complete streets project was completed, creating 560 new jobs. Additionally, the value of property on Edgewater increased by 80 percent and the value of property within half a mile of the road rose by 70 percent.

“These are positive results when you make a street walkable,” she said. “People want to be able to walk downtown. We talk about how there’s not enough parking downtown. How nice would it be for people to ride bikes or be able to walk downtown with their kids in a stroller or wagon?”

Currently, she said, residents wouldn’t dare walk or bike on Drew Street because it’s too dangerous.

Council member Lina Teixeira, however, said she has major concerns about the FDOT’s study.

“I came up with 16 questionable or incorrect data points. That’s alarming to me,” she said.

I know that Drew Street is not safe,” Teixeira said. But she said there are alternatives that can be tried before redesigning the road, such as striping.

According to the Federal Highway Administration, creating edgelines, centerlines and lane lines with striping or pavement marking is an economical way to reduce congestion and save lives. The FHA said longitudinal pavement markings have proven to reduce crashes by 23 percent and edgelines reduce crashes by 8 percent. Additionally, striping reduces travel times, said the FHA.

While cheaper than a complete streets project, Tara Kivett, the city’s construction manager, said striping carries a hefty price tag. She estimates it will cost $2 million to $4 million to stripe Drew Street because it involves the removal and replacement of asphalt.

Although she said she believes striping Drew Street is just delaying the inevitable, Beckman said she’s willing to have the county come up with a firm cost estimate while city conducts a pilot study that examines the impact on surrounding roads, which would take about six months

Council member David Allbritton agreed that further study is warranted.

“I know a lot of people want to see a change to Drew Street because it’s dangerous but we don’t want to make the problem worse so we need to do a little more homework on this,” he said. “It would good to do a pilot as long as can can do it quickly and at a low cost.”

He said striping could be a temporary solution but added that striping the road isn’t going to solve problems like the lack of a continuous sidewalk, the narrowness of the existing sidewalks and the fact that there are telephone poles in the middle of some of the sidewalks.

Aungst also favored trying striping.

“It was recommended back in 2018,” he said. “I wasn’t on the council so I don’t know why it wasn’t done. But let’s go ahead and get it striped and see if traffic speeds are reduced and accidents go down. We will get the traffic calmed much quicker and then move forward with the permanent project.”