We don’t always know safety best

The Monroe Board of County Commissioners Wednesday decided not to endorse a pedestrian cross walk on US 1 about a quarter-mile west of the traffic light.

The commissioners were concerned that they were asking the Florida Department of Transportation to unilaterally change the face of traveling on Big Pine Key without enough public input.

The idea originated through a request from Big Pine Academy for a school zone to heighten safety for the children who walk to school every day during the school year.

FDOT refused the school zone, claiming that it would decrease level of service on the island, an already shaky issue, and that the site of the school didn’t meet the criteria used by FDOT for establishment of a school zone.

With that denial, the BOCC hired a consultant to do a study on the best option for providing a safer means for school kids, and other pedestrians, to cross US 1 without running the risk of a major meeting with a piece of hurtling Detroit iron.

The consultant’s proposal called for the establishment of a crosswalk area basically between the two public transit stops in front of NAPA and in front of Walgreens. The thought was that the extra quarter-mile where there is a crosswalk at the traffic light made the walk too far for younger children, so they and their parents remained on the bay side anyway until they got closer to the school and then just braved traffic to reach the ocean side where the school is located.

The proximity of the public transit stops also made it easier for riders to get form one side of US 1 to the others with the proposal.

Included in that proposal was a marked crosswalk with a raised median in the middle. There could be no traffic light or other traffic calming device put in place so close to the light that backs up traffic for miles anyway during busy times. And that makes it nearly impossible for pedestrians, particularly young pedestrians, to make it all the way across the four lanes of US 1 in one shot.

The center median would ostensibly give pedestrians a chance to stay safely out of traffic while they waited for the opening that would allow to take the second half of the highway in relative safety.

It was a workable compromise.

But the BOCC didn’t like that compromise, even after they paid professionals to come up with a legally sound and solid engineering solution to the issue.

And some of the reasons used for not liking the idea make little sense to us.

To set the stage, the proposed crosswalk would have traversed one southbound lane, then a center scramble lane, then two northbound lanes to get from bay side to ocean side. The median would have been in the center scramble lane, also known as a suicide lane.

One of the concerns was that people used the center lane in that area as an acceleration lane, going either direction with a left hand turn to get out into traffic.

First, that move is highly illegal, although tolerated by local law enforcement. Second, by using that as a reason to look for another alternative, the BOCC is condoning an inherently dangerous and illegal practice.

FDOT doesn’t use community input to decide when and where safety enhancements are placed on a highway. The agency uses data. And the data says that this was the best probable location.

By asking FDOT to conduct further study, which it will decline to do since it already pays Monroe County to conduct such studies and simply wants to see the data-driven results and a recommendation afterward, the BOCC has set the process back a year or more.

And that’s another year where our students face the daunting task of crossing US 1 through possibly four lanes of fast-moving traffic.

The fact that we don’t like the location doesn’t change the fact that it was a workable compromise to enhance the safety of our kids.

Those kids and their parents are still going to cross the highway in that location. We have just made sure that they do so without our help for the foreseeable future.

Not a great way to address public safety.

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