Editorial

People of North Beach:
Embrace the Traffic Anger

But don’t blame FDOT. Blame the political will of the City Commission majority.

They say Miami Beach north of 63rd Street, also known as North Beach, is an up-and-coming area. A place where new and vibrant businesses are popping up and quality homes can be found or will soon be constructed for prices that are not South Beach outrageous. Then there are public amenities like the North Beach Bandshell, the North Shore Community Center and various parks, including the oceanfront North Shore Open Space Park and Altos Del Mar.

But those who want to check out this up-and-coming place are dissuaded from doing so by traffic snags that have plagued North Beach ever since this past summer when Miami Beach effectively endorsed the demolition of the 63rd Street flyover. This was made painfully clear last weekend (the weekend Art Miami was in town at the Convention Center) by the bumper-to-bumper traffic that affected every major roadway as far south as 41st Street. But for those who live or work near North Beach — including the communities to its north in Surfside, Bay Harbor Islands, Bal Harbour and Sunny Isles Beach — avoiding the commute was not an option, they had to endure the traffic hell.

From 9 p.m. Friday, Jan. 5 to Monday, Jan. 8 at 6 a.m. the Florida Department of Transportation closed all eastbound traffic on 63rd Street, making driving on the Beach impossible.

And soon there will be a repeat of the bumper-to-bumper experience. From 9 a.m. Friday, Jan. 12 until Monday, Jan. 15 at 6 a.m., during Art Deco Weekend, both lanes of traffic will be blocked to any non-emergency vehicle.

“Both of the closures are necessary in order to undertake the appropriate reconstruction of the intersection of 63rd Street and Indian Creek,” according to a Dec. 28 memo from City Manager Jorge Gonzalez to the Miami Beach City Commission. “No other alternatives are available to the contractor.”

The cause of the “appropriate reconstruction”? The destruction of the 63rd Street flyover — the very flyover a majority of Miami Beach voters wanted preserved in a November 2004 straw ballot but was not backed by the majority of the City Commission. By the time the certainty of traffic chaos became apparent to even those commissioners who enthusiastically backed its flattening, it was too late — FDOT had assigned the contractors and was moving forward.

But don’t blame FDOT. Blame the political will of the City Commission majority. Since the late 1990s, it has endorsed the flyover’s destruction in a series of votes for a variety of reasons — improvement of traffic flow, the structural integrity of flyover and the tendency of trucks to get stuck beneath the car bridge. The many opponents of the flyover’s demolition, including public officials in Surfside, Miami Beach Commissioner Richard Steinberg, then-commissioner (and now city attorney) Jose Smith and several North Beach residents — poked many holes in the arguments for the flyover’s destruction. Traffic flow improvement is expected to be only slightly better after the several months of traffic torment many North Beach residents are now going through. The flyover was structurally strong. There were trucks that ran into the flyover, but that problem could have been solved by lowering the grade of Indian Creek Drive.

The push to rip down the flyover picked up steam in the mid-1990s, when developer Craig Robins embarked on transforming St. Francis Hospital into the “new urbanism” community now known as Aqua, located adjacent to the flyover. The flyover didn’t fit into Robins’ plans, North Beach activists have long accused. In 2000, Robins even paid for a traffic study that — surprise, surprise — showed that razing the flyover would improve car traffic. “We’ve lost two years on resolving this issue because of our inability to come to a decision,” Robins chided the commission in 2000. By a 4-3 vote, the commission backed the flyover’s demolition.

For the next four years, 4-3 votes continued to favor demolition. In more recent years, those four votes were commissioners Saul Gross, Matti Bower, Simon Cruz and Luis Garcia (now in the state Legislature).

Now the question remains: Even if traffic flow is improved, what will be done to compensate North Beach business owners and residents who have been forced to endure traffic tie-ups since demolition on the flyover commenced last summer? And what will happen during Super Bowl weekend? The Miami International Boat Show?

Residents of North Beach and neighboring municipalities have every right to feel angry right now. They have every right to ask questions as to when they will have full access to their roadways again. And these questions should not only be asked of FDOT but also of Miami Beach’s elected officials.