Task Force wants traffic solutions — now

If Longboat Key set aside portions of its noise ordinance, perhaps some island workers could begin their jobs earlier and leave earlier, eliminating a bloc of traffic during peak periods.

If Sarasota and Manatee counties imposed a higher tourist tax during season and scrapped it during the summer, maybe fewer visitors would be on the roads at peak times.

While these are obviously hypothetical — and not ideal — traffic fixes, the Longboat Key Revitalization Task Force wants government officials to stop waiting for perfect solutions when good ones might just work. The group’s main point: try something — anything — and see what happens.

The Sarasota-Manatee Metropolitan Planning Organization will consider the issue during its Jan. 23 meeting, during which Task Force President Tom Freiwald will present a file-folder full of petitions the organization has received pushing for temporary traffic solutions. The top of the list includes:

• Manually controlling the light at 119th Street and Cortez Road;
• Manually controlling — or synchronizing — traffic lights along Gulfstream Avenue at Sunset Drive and Golden Gate Point, Ken Thompson Parkway and Longboat Club Road at Gulf of Mexico Drive and Fruitville Road at North Tamiami Trail;
• Bypassing routes and pedestrian control on St. Armands, and eliminating eight parking spaces between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m.; and
• Banning bridge openings for training, testing and maintenance between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.

If the MPO doesn’t take action at the meeting, Freiwald said he will take Florida Department of Transportation Secretary Jim Boxold up on his suggestion to deliver the ideas to him personally.

“Our goal is for somebody to do something,” said Lenny Landau, a Task Force member since the group formed in 2011. “We don’t see any evidence that anyone’s doing anything.”

The MPO is currently vetting consultants for a $675,000 barrier island traffic study that the state has estimated it will take up to 1,500 hours to complete. And of the four similar traffic studies conducted since 2005, no concrete solutions have been implemented.

“The MPO process is a bureaucratic process, and I’m not being critical of it, but it’s very bureaucratic to say the least,” said Commissioner Jack Daly, the town’s representative on the board.

Freiwald and Landau hope the petitions they have received — one all the way from the United Kingdom — persuade MPO board members to work on pilot traffic programs as the study is underway.

“My focus is more on keeping the focus on the barrier island study, and on the long-term results and from my perspective, anything we can do short-term or in a pilot program is good,” Daly said. “It’s almost like gravy on mashed potatoes — it’s good.”

Landau said there are other creative solutions that town commissioners and businesses could consider as well, such as real-time cameras mounted at high-traffic corridors. That way, residents would have a supplement to Google Maps in determining when they should leave the Key.

“The secret is you get local businesses to sponsor it, and that way the town doesn’t have to pay anything,” Landau said.

Although the group is seeking solutions to traffic issues, they’ve also encountered hurdles in finding data to help guide these fixes. The state conducts traffic counts once a year, and because that data is extrapolated over the year, it doesn’t take seasonal traffic into account, Freiwald said.

Traffic may have the biggest immediate impact on residents, but Task Force members warn that ignoring short-term fixes — or even giving different solutions short-term trials — could harm the region’s tourism draw.

“We’re going to kill the goose that laid the golden egg,” Freiwald said. “People are going to say, ‘I’m not going back there.’’’