Henrietta Schwarz and William Finan are members of the South Bayshore Drive Condo Alliance Safety Committee. The Alliance represents the cluster of condominiums adjacent to South Bayshore Drive between McFarlane Road and Aviation Avenue. Schwarz and Finan wrote this opinion piece for the Spotlight.
An interesting facet of Coconut Grove’s history, probably one that most residents of the Grove are unaware of, is how, since 1998, there have been no fewer than five successive master plans prepared covering Coconut Grove.
Each seeks to guide the future development of Grove’s commercial and community life. (See the link below.) As members of a recently formed civic organization’s safety committee, we sought to avoid reinventing the wheel by reviewing the plans’ recommendations for improving pedestrian (and biking) safety.
The first modern master plan covering the Grove was prepared in 1998 co-sponsored by the City of Miami and the Coconut Grove Village Council. The most recent plan was prepared in 2020 by a Grove civic group, GroveConnect, with significant community input. The GroveConnect report recommended improving pedestrian and biking safety by reducing the speed limit on all Grove roads from 30 mph to 25 mph.
In the intervening years, two plans were prepared by the City of Miami in 2003 and 2008. In 2018, the Coconut Grove Business Improvement District (BID) issued a highly regarded plan in connection with the BID’s reauthorization that was quickly shelved once the City renewed the BID’s mandate for ten years.
All five of the plans made recommendations to improve pedestrian and biking safety in the Grove.
Improving bike safety has met with some success primarily due to the efforts of Bike Coconut Grove and Friends of the Commodore Trail (FCT), an offshoot of Bike Coconut Grove. These two organizations have been instrumental, for example, in establishing the Safe Routes to Schools program for Grove schools.
The FCT is currently leading negotiations with the County’s Department of Transportation and Public Works (DTPW) seeking to modify the County’s plan for the 1.5 mile stretch of South Bayshore Drive between Mercy Way and Darwin Street to better take into consideration pedestrian and bike safety.
While improving bike safety in the Grove has champions, we found that the plans’ recommendations to improve pedestrian safety were mostly set aside and largely forgotten. To mention one notable example: the BID-commissioned master plan recommended establishing a pedestrian “scramble” at the junction of Main Highway, McFarlane Road, and Grand Avenue. But this widely acclaimed idea to improve pedestrian safety never even advanced to a feasibility study stage — in part, some believe, because of opposition from within the BID’s own board.
As our review progressed, we started delving into the complexities posed by different federal, state, county, and city agencies that all play a role in developing pedestrian safety guidelines but are not always aligned on how to apply them.
At the top of the agency hierarchy for traffic safety is the Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration (FHA) whose role locally can be summarized mainly as a cheerleader (and funding sponsor) for improved pedestrian safety through better road design.
In 2015 the FHA launched a national initiative called “Safer People, Safer Streets” which served as a backdrop to county and city pedestrian safety initiatives taken in the past decade.
At the state level Florida’s Department of Transportation’s (FDOT’s) 2018 “Greenbook” acts as a reference authority guiding the design of all public streets not part of the state’s highway system.
The Greenbook stresses “context-sensitive” street design to improve pedestrian safety defined by FDOT to mean “creative ways to improve the transportation system” considering community interests.
Material changes in the local context, the Greenbook instructs, should be considered in making future changes to a road’s design to improve pedestrian (and bike) safety. For example, based on considering local context factors, to enhance pedestrian safety the FDOT allows narrower lane widths relative to traditional road designs.
The local context along South Bayshore Drive has unquestionably changed. Along the north side between McFarlane and Aviation, new condo developments increased the population over threefold since 2000. On the south side adjacent to Miami City Hall, multiple venues with over 1500-person capacity have significantly increased traffic.
The FDOT’s emphasis on improving pedestrian safety is quite relevant considering the design of South Bayshore Drive.
South Bayshore Drive today is an over-engineered roadway meaning the road’s design encourages drivers to exceed the posted speed limit thereby endangering pedestrians and bikers alike.
The material changes to the context along the length of South Bayshore Drive suggest county and city officials need to join in studying how the currently overdesigned South Bayshore Drive roadway can be redesigned to reduce excessive vehicle speeds to improve pedestrian (and bike) safety for the large and growing residential population living adjacent to it.
In 2021 FDOT issued a study, “Pedestrian and Bicycle Strategic Safety Plan,” which concluded – perhaps stating the obvious – higher vehicle speed leads to a greater risk of pedestrian fatalities. An increase of 10 miles per hour from 30 to 40 mph, according to FDOT, reduces the survival rate of a pedestrian struck in an accident by one-third.
Excessive vehicle speed is unquestionably a major and growing problem in the Grove, especially along South Bayshore Drive. In 2023 alone, the Miami-Dade Police Department issued nearly 500 summons for speeding in Coconut Grove, many along South Bayshore Drive. Of this total, nearly two-thirds were issued for “Violation Municipal speed/posted (required speeds).” But, according to the Police Department, ticketing only has a transitory benefit in curbing speeding.
Miami-Dade County has been ranked as the fourth most dangerous metropolitan area in the nation for pedestrians.
Two Miami-Dade County initiatives adopted in the past 10 years recommend applying better road design concepts to improve pedestrian safety. The first is “Vision Zero,” a program rolled out nationally across urban areas seeking to drive down accidents through better street design. Formally adopted by the County in 2021, after three years of preliminary study, Vision Zero has been slowly rolled out across the County at high accident-prone intersections such as in Little Haiti.
The second is Miami-Dade’s “Complete Streets Design Guidelines” adopted in 2016. These guidelines conclude that traditional neighborhood development, of which Coconut Grove certainly qualifies, should “establish a design speed (target speed) that creates a safer and more comfortable environment for pedestrians and bicyclists, and is appropriate for the surrounding context. (Emphasis added.)”
FDOT’s Greenbook defines “design speed” or “target speed” as establishing a speed limit “considering the topography, anticipated operating speed, adjacent land use, and functional classification of the highway.”
Setting the appropriate target speed for the county roads transiting the Grove should consider, per FDOT’s guidance, the number of new residential and commercial buildings proposed and under construction along Grand Avenue, the schools along Main Highway and Grand Avenue, and along South Bayshore Drive’s tripling of the population, and the opening of multiple dining and entertainment venues.
Yet still another complexity we learned about in understanding why improving pedestrian safety in the Grove is so difficult to achieve is the fractured jurisdictional control over the Grove’s streets. One might think, for example, that the jurisdiction over South Bayshore Drive running in front of Miami City Hall would belong to the city. But in fact, it is a county road. We believe only through collaboration between the city and county officials can meaningful progress on improving pedestrian safety be achieved.
Ken Russell, former City of Miami District 2 commissioner, did precisely this by putting in place an intergovernmental agreement between the city and the county to consider expedited approvals for constructing traffic calming measures on Grove residential streets. Unfortunately, this history has been overlooked as the city attempts to construct traffic calming measures in the West Grove.
Setting a posted speed limit of 25 mph – versus the current 30 mph – for Main Highway, Grand Avenue, McFarlane Road, and South Bayshore Drive would be a transformational change significantly improving pedestrian (and bike) safety.
Some will undoubtedly oppose this change believing it will cause delays for commuters. But, by applying modern road design concepts, this does not have to be the outcome.
A recent study by the National Association of City Transportation Officials found that better, modern road design can reduce excessive vehicle speeds with little or no negative impact on a road’s capacity (the throughput of vehicles).
But how can we get our county and city political leaders to join in supporting improving pedestrian safety in the Grove by lowering the posted speed limit on the county-controlled roads to 25 mph?
Unquestionably this requires the Grove civic community to educate our political leaders on its merits. (Background information on the timeline for the five Grove master plans and other pedestrian safety-related reports can be viewed here. For a link to all reports, email William Finan at [email protected]).
