For the Sake of Beauty
Some Turn Lanes Will Be Lost in $22.3 Million Project

“It has been done but the report has not been published yet.”

Convention Center drive is just one of the thoroughfares the city has plans for. Photo by Angie Hargot

By Angie Hargot

South Beach residents can expect to see more roads being torn up over the next few years near Lincoln Road and the Convention Center. The purpose? A better-looking City Center, project planners say.

The Miami Beach Capital Improvement Projects (CIP) Office unveiled the next step in the City Center project that has been steadily trudging forward for more than two years and is slated to wrap up construction in December 2009, during a Community Design Review Workshop held Nov. 29.

Project architect Jim Hill led a presentation of the city’s plans for the City Center redevelopment district, located south of Dade Boulevard. The designs under review mostly centered on widening and resurfacing sidewalks, adding some “bump-outs,” and converting some existing turn lanes into irrigated and landscaped medians “the width of a full lane of traffic,” Hill said. It’s all toward the endgame of making the streets more “pedestrian-friendly,” he said.

Coupled with water and sewer main replacement and storm water drainage renovations, the City Center improvements are projected to cost the city about $22.3 million, and, in construction phases, will tie up various streets in the area for the next three years.

During construction, half of each street will be temporarily closed, traditionally for the length of a few city blocks at once, as the streets are repaved or other construction occurs, said CIP Director Jorge Chartrand. After construction, traffic “will not be affected,” he said.

The expected effect on traffic has been determined through designers’ “experience,” “following city and county code,” and a study, according to Chartrand.

The project’s actual construction pattern most likely won’t be determined until a contractor wins a bid for construction that planners “can work with.” The completion date for the bid and award phase of the project is currently December 2007.

However, the contents of the traffic study remain a mystery. “It has been done,” Chartrand told the SunPost. “But the report has not been published yet. When the report is published it is given to the engineers, who can adjust the plans accordingly. The engineers have been in contact with Public Works.”

An official in the Public Works Department explained the department is currently conducting traffic counts for the City Center area — basically counting vehicle traffic in a given area to then apply formulas for predicting future traffic needs — in order to make recommendations to the CIP. The department is also responsible for analyzing the effects that changes such as those to medians and sidewalks create. According to the department, it’s difficult to improve the capacity of streets due to lack of space to add lanes. But improving conditions for pedestrians can help traffic patterns in one kind-of-obvious way – it keeps people out of the way of cars.

With the report not yet completed, the designs have, so far, hit one little snag — the length of one street’s “storage lane,” a sort of staging area for a turn lane. One official in the Public Works Department expects to see the report ready in about two months.

Chartrand likened the probable traffic problems relating to construction to those that affected Washington Avenue during its renovation last year. “Of course there was disruption,” he said.

The streetscaping improvements also include that all sidewalks will be replaced with “Miami Beach Red Concrete,” flush red brick-paved crosswalks and “Lincoln Road satellite” streetlights. Landscaping changes will include both shade trees and various species of palms. And while “most streets are too narrow to landscape the swales,” Hill said, whenever possible swales will also see some renovations.

The city may get a sidewalk along the area of 19^th Street from Convention Center Drive to Meridian, “one of the things we tried to accomplish was to try to get a continuous sidewalk, at least on one side of the street,” Hill said.

No street space is being lost on Convention Center Drive, where the most drastic impact is expected, due to lanes being “wider than the city code [requires],” Chartrand said. “They have to be a minimum of 10 feet wide; they’re about 16 or 18 or 12 feet wide,” he said.

Chartrand said the whole City Center project is the result of citizens’ desire to beautify the area, as expressed during community meetings.

The plans were generally well received by the few Miami Beach residents present at last week’s CIP meeting.

“I think it’s a great plan,” Ray Breslin, president of the Collins Park Neighborhood Association, told the SunPost. “This all started with money from the General Obligation Bond back in 1998, and we’re just starting to see some of [the improvements]. It’s like, ‘Where are they?’ But Rome wasn’t built in a day,” he said.

Comments? E-mail angie@miamisunpost.com.