Henrietta Schwarz and William Finan are members of the South Bayshore Drive Condo Alliance Safety Committee, which represents a cluster of condominiums adjacent to South Bayshore Drive between McFarlane Road and Aviation Avenue. They wrote this opinion piece for the Spotlight as a companion to their previous Community Voices piece on pedestrian safety, which ran in November and which you can find here.
More than any other area of Miami, Coconut Grove has a well-deserved reputation as being a great walking district. On any given day, you will see parents walking and biking their kids to school, runners, babies in strollers, dogs being walked, people heading to dinner, sailors on their way to the bayside or crossing the street to do some shopping.
In recent years Grove residents have witnessed changes making it increasingly unsafe for pedestrians, including:
The sheer volume of cars and development
There are increasing numbers of vehicles transiting the Grove as drivers’ GPS directs them to use Grove roads to bypass the bumper-to-bumper traffic on saturated South Dixie Highway, especially during peak commuting hours.
The completion of Grove at Grand Bay (96 units), Park Grove (132 units), and Mr. C’s (118 units) has added hundreds of cars to this traffic maelstrom. When you take some of the smaller buildings and new single-home projects being built, the recent saturation of new residents has swelled far beyond the capacity of the existing roadway and sidewalk infrastructure. Sidewalk closures due to construction (why don’t they build pedestrian tunnels?) have added another danger by forcing people to cross the street, many poorly marked or lacking signage.
The speed of cars transiting our roads
Who hasn’t walked the streets of Coconut Grove and muttered under their breath, ‘Geez, slow down.’ We’ve always had speeders in the Grove, but in the last few years, it has spiraled into a catastrophe waiting to happen.
By the grace of higher powers, no one has been killed, but a Ransom Everglades teacher was seriously hurt last year, and residents who do walk see near misses frequently.
Speeding and distracted drivers constitute a real danger to Grove residents. Vehicles transiting the Grove during off-peak times and weekends are speeding – evidenced by 350 speeding tickets issued in a 12 twelve-month period.
Resident activist groups around the Grove have pleaded for better enforcement, but as great as Miami Police Commander Daniel Kerr is on most subjects, dedicating staff hours to enforcement has been sporadic and inconsistent due to limited manpower. The addition of Regatta Grove, The Hanger, and The Bayshore Club has exacerbated the problems on South Bayshore Drive, specifically.
The increased size of vehicles
There is an increasing number of popular tall SUVs and large pickups on Grove roads. A recent safety report identified this trend as a major contributor to serious pedestrian accidents due to their size and weight.
We can’t change the preferences of cars people choose, but recent studies, including Vision Zero, have shown lowering vehicle speeds, especially these larger vehicles, significantly reduces the risk of serious pedestrian injuries and fatalities.
Previous master plans prepared for Coconut Grove – such as the CG Business Improvement District (2018) and the Grove 2030 report (2020), along with the Florida Department of Transportation’s Greenbook guidelines and the County’s Vision Zero and Complete Streets Design Guidelines initiatives, provide a roadmap to how to improve pedestrian safety.
First and foremost, excess vehicle speeds on the Grove’s County roads and City streets must be reduced.
Past plans recommended reducing the posted speed limit to 25 mph. Studies suggest even a 25-mph speed limit may be too high for densely populated areas with large numbers of pedestrians, such as the central Coconut Grove business district.
The speed limit in the central district should be 20 mph. Adding small rumble strips at key pedestrian crossings of Main Highway and Grand Avenue (red warning flags alone are nice and cute but are not sufficient!) would be a major pedestrian safety enhancement and would not impede emergency vehicles.
Creating a 20-mph pedestrian safety zone (like school safety zones) in the Central Grove business district can be accomplished inexpensively and simply with painted warning signs on the roadway along with 20-mph speed limit signs (see the example above of a painted street panel in Paris showing the speed limit). Same for setting a lower speed limit of 25 mph on Main Highway and Grand Avenue.
South Bayshore Drive is over-engineered and thus encourages speeding. To address this problem requires better road design incorporating traffic calming measures (see FDOT and other reports supporting this conclusion). This can be part of a longer term, phased approach which could include creating a pedestrian “scramble” (as the Coconut Grove Business Improvement District’s master plan recommended).
Secondly, better pedestrian signage and street crossing markings are needed.
Three members of the South Bayshore Drive Condo Alliance (Henrietta Schwarz of Governor House Condo Association, Irwin Halperin of Grove Hill Condo Association, and Gabor Garcia of Park Grove Condo Association, along with Diego Abreu from Miami-Dade District 7 Commissioner Raquel Regalado’s office) recently walked Aviation to 27th Avenue on South Bayshore Drive, and 27th Avenue to Darwin Street on Tigertail Avenue to identify pedestrian safety issues.
For instance, drivers crossing Tigertail at Darwin heading northbound cannot see oncoming traffic. The solution we requested was to make it a four-way stop.
Numerous other locations (seven to be exact) were also discussed. Common sense, a little paint, and better signage will go a long way to address these problems. We are waiting to hear back from the Miami-Dade Department of Transportation and Public Works (DTPW) on what steps they will take to address the problems we identified.
Another interesting example is how traffic calming devices came to be installed throughout South Grove. In 1996, the county adopted a policy seeking to minimize the political pressures to adopt more and more street closures as a way of limiting traffic cutting through residential neighborhoods and instead installing road-calming infrastructure (e.g., speed humps and roundabouts).
In 2014, the Miami City Commission implemented an inter-governmental agency agreement with Miami-Dade that gave the city the necessary jurisdiction over the installation, maintenance, and use of certain traffic calming devices under an expedited review and approvals process worked out in collaboration with the DTPW.
In May 2021, the City of Miami issued the South Grove Neighborhood Traffic Calming Study. This report was prepared with significant community input and, unlike many reports on pedestrian safety improvements we reviewed, it was quickly followed up on thanks to some political leadership.
In November 2021, then Miami District 2 Commissioner Ken Russell passed a resolution allowing a streamlined review of traffic calming devices, per ones identified in the traffic study, at 50 locations throughout South Grove. This example shows how collaboration between the city and the community, with committed political leadership, can deliver real changes to improve pedestrian and biking safety in the Grove.
In summary, as the Coconut Grove family and retired populations continue to grow, as more condo developments stress the traffic capacity of the Grove’s roads and streets, and as more people come to enjoy the Grove’s social venues, the decline in pedestrian safety has reached a tipping point.
We need our county, city, and business leaders to act and, working with the Grove community, reverse this trend.
