The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: the Boulevard Post-DeMoya

The main joy from the completion of our 850 Days of Hell is like the wonderful feeling when you stop beating your head against the wall. We now mostly have back what we had before, which is a relief after suffering pointless deprivation for so long.

The main improvement we can see is the drainage. I asked how they did it, and it was simple math. You see how they elevated the road in the former underwater areas, leaving sloping asphalt down to several businesses. I asked what went wrong on the recent work on South Roosevelt, where the repaving left larger lakes in front of La Brisa and east. They said DeMoya had not done the work that far down, but was engaged to do a future project on that stretch, so we can hope for some improvement.

A second visible improvement is the new sidewalk on the business side. This is not important to me, with the wonderful promenade on the ocean side, but many people will like it.

A third thing that we can see is not an improvement, but an eyesore averted. FDOT figured out an end-around for their fence rule by making their 9-inch-high concrete curbs 22 inches across. That width is not what is necessary to stop a car. Rather, that is the minimum width from the right of way to the drop off to avoid triggering the fence rule. They figured this out themselves, and at no cost to us. Hurray for badness averted.

Of course, the improvements we cannot see and are valuable are the pipes and seawall. This is necessary infrastructure and we are all glad it has been done. But elsewhere it is done in a fraction of the time.

From here on it’s all bad and ugly. To recap previous reporting here and elsewhere, FDOT violated two of its general principles when bidding this contract. First, they generally offer an incentive for early completion.  The FDOT offers 13 pages of guidelines for setting the duration of projects like ours. They clearly understand and address the problem: “If too much time is allowed then the traveling public is being inconvenienced and the contractor does not appear to be aggressively pursuing the work. . . . [A]ll too often the causes are traceable to excessive time originally established by the scheduling engineer to complete the project or poor contractor scheduling of construction operations.”

And they offer solutions for problems like ours: “Procedures to accelerate project completion should be considered when construction will affect traffic substantially or when project completion is crucial. This is especially important in urban areas with high traffic volumes. When accelerating contract time for time sensitive projects, production rates should be based on an efficient contractor working more than eight hours per day, more than five days per week and possibly with additional workers. “

Further, in the bidding process they are supposed to encourage competitive bidding to lower the duration of the projects by incorporating a  “Value of Time Factor.”  That is, a shorter contract will get an advantage in the bidding contest.  At the $2,000/day the FDOT offers in their examples, General Asphalt, the second place bidder who lost by the equivalent of one dollar out of 4,000, would have only had to offer to complete in 7 days less to win the bid.

But the FDOT didn’t bother to offer the Value of Time Factor for this project. Or encourage more workers or longer work days.  Why not?  I think the key is that we in the Keys are simply not key business for DeMoya. On their website, they list “Key Projects.” It includes a project half the cost of ours they finished ten years ago. but it didn’t include us.

We could have had a company for whom we would have been their biggest project. Instead, we were an afterthought for DeMoya, and their largely-absent work crews showed it.

The worst decision was over-ruling their general principle to maintain two-way traffic. This is from their construction manual: “102-5.3 Number of Traffic Lanes: Maintain one lane of traffic in each direction. Maintain two lanes of traffic in each direction at existing four (or more) lane cross roads, where necessary to avoid undue traffic congestion.” They recognize that it is devastating for businesses to convert two-way traffic to one way.

Instead, they talked our City Commission into the worst decision of their careers: approving the one way because of an imagined, and entirely incorrect, fear of congestion from people making turns. I argued first that no such problem existed on the two-way portion between Eisenhower and Palm. I also wrote that there was plenty of room for two lanes with a turn lane, which is eventually what we got.

The best story was that We the People stood up to FDOT and our incorrect commissioners. The Coalition of North Roosevelt Affected Businesses represented those losing collectively millions and even going bankrupt due to lost business from the one-way. They met several times and successfully swayed the Secretary of Transportation, Ananth Prasad, to change back when he visited here. A single Commissioner, Tony Yaniz, who had not been a commissioner when the foolish vote occurred to approve the one-way, led the way in our government to fix what was so clearly broken.

Part of the truly ugly was that even after Prasad made his decision, Mayor Cates and Commissioner Rossi fought to maintain the one-way. At least Rossi admitted to me in an email that I was right, after the two-way proved to be a business-saving success.

Also bad was the ridiculous use of the Salt Run bridge to store pipes and dirt for a year, making bikers and pedestrians cross the road twice, endangering themselves and further slowing already-clogged traffic. I closely watched this area all year. Work was done at most 1% of the time. The rest of the time, it was a convenient storage area, DeMoya not wanting to cut into their profits by renting the empty Taco Bell parking lot across the street for their storage needs.

Another pointless waste was not opening at least one extra lane in the bottleneck between the lights at Kennedy and the Overseas Market. No work at all was done in the eternally empty lanes, at least one of which could have allowed traffic in at least one direction to flow more freely. Again, it is a general FDOT principle to care for traffic flow in such areas. In our case, they just didn’t give a damn.

Now for the ugly, the last minute cherries on the sundae which are more like dead rats on top of a dog poop in your driveway: the traffic signal at the Y inbound, and the sharrows encouraging bicyclists like me to die in the car traffic. These two “policy” decisions are the governmental versions of autistic behavior.

The “policy” governing the Y sign is that it has to be perpendicular to the traffic lane. In this case, they decided the “traffic lane” was the last ten feet of the road curling into town to turn left on A1A toward Flagler. But that is not where you see  the traffic light in order to decide whether to slow down or maintain speed .You need to see the light around 50-100 feet before the intersection in order to decide to hit the brake. That is the very purpose of a traffic light, to warn you what to do in time to do it.

Where the light is now, you don’t see it until it is too late to decide. This is just nuts. It ignores the point of having the light. Ugly as a dead rat.

Just as foolish, and probably even more deadly, are the inane “sharrows” and signs with a cheerful bike above the words “MAY USE FULL LANE.” The bike is not a skinny-tired, under-slung fast bike, but a bike like mine—a fat-tired, upright-handlebars conch cruiser, built for comfort, not for speed.

The autistic “policy” guiding these sharrows and signs is to “protect” bikes in the traffic lane. What they in fact do is encourage bikes to play in the traffic right next to the most wonderful bike promenade in the whole wide world. These signs irresponsibly encourage dangerous behavior. Recently I saw two young women in the traffic lane, edged up to the curb as traffic roared past them at 30 mph. At night.

I tried riding my bike in my rightful lane, and, as I’ve written in KONK Life, it is a ridiculous and frightening activity. The reason FDOT gives is that bikes are a danger to people walking on the promenade. Well, I wasted a fair amount of our city’s staff time trying to find a single incident of bike-on-promenade-walker injury. There are plenty of car-on-bike accidents, but they couldn’t find a single example of FDOT’s imagined dangers. It reminds me of the traffic horrors promised from two-waying the Boulevard.

The daily paper took a sideswipe at the only people who forced any smart thinking about this train wreck of a project: “While some locals bemoaned the project from start to finish, criticizing every move made by the crews and the state leaders . . ..” You can definitely put a photo of me with that as its caption. But how many also did what I did, which was write a formal letter of appreciation to Ananth Prasad, for over-ruling his own people and our addled commissioners to convert the one-way to two?  And, in point of fact, I have been desperately happy to cheer any of the good things in print, like the drainage, which indeed no one else has reported. So there is actually no one who has “criticized every move,” and this is simply another tendentious and false asseveration.

Finally, I, the Blue Paper, KONK Life, Tony Yaniz, and the coalition of business owners actually helped fix things instead of cheer-leading the boondoggle. Thank goodness they had to invite Tony to the ribbon-cutting because of his position as a Commissioner.  Of course, no one who had accurately criticized the boondoggle except Tony got to pee on their parade.  But even here, the daily chose to belittle Tony by referring admiringly to Craig Cates’ utterly unjust shushing of Tony on July 21, when Tony’s impassioned remonstrances to the Secretary actually helped fix things.

A late development is concrete islands for cars to run into at oddly placed crosswalks. Did our commissioners approve these? Are they placed according to “policy”? To build them, they are still blocking traffic with machinery? Why isn’t the clock running on financial penalties? The project will be completed when the proper speed limit signs are up, and they stop working. That hasn’t happened yet.

Most importantly, what have we learned from this process?  My sad conclusion: Nothing. It will happen again. And again and again. Darn.