Real quick, what are the top 10 problems plaguing Fort Lauderdale?
We’re betting hellish traffic — the top gripe among residents and visitors — might be high on your list. It’s high on the city’s list, too.
Every year, traffic gridlock and how to fix it comes up at Fort Lauderdale’s annual goal-setting workshop. This year’s half-day session, held on Thursday at the new YMCA center on Sistrunk Boulevard, was no different.
The commission and staffers from City Hall spent more than three hours brainstorming ways to make the fast-growing city better.
Even with three new commissioners on the dais, priorities for the coming year were similar to those hatched last year by a different commission: Transportation and traffic; housing and homelessness; infrastructure, including plans for a new water treatment plant; parks and public spaces; waterway quality; public safety; and economic development.
The final list of priorities will be approved by commissioners at a later meeting, a city spokeswoman said.
As for tackling those traffic woes, Commissioner Steve Glassman says he’s still hoping The Boring Company will agree to pay for a Tesla tunnel that would whisk passengers from downtown to the beach. That project could lead to others, including a tunnel from the airport to the seaport and others for high-congestion zones, he said.
“We’re really at the point now where we have to look at better ways to move people,” Glassman said. “We’re landlocked. We can’t add lanes.”
‘Stuck in traffic’
Commissioner John Herbst, elected in November, says he heard plenty of complaints about traffic from constituents he met on the campaign trail.
“Traffic on Federal Highway, Sunrise Boulevard and the core downtown is a concern to them,” he said. “As more projects get built, we need to make sure we can move people from where they are to where they need to be without being stuck in traffic for an hour.”
Even Mayor Dean Trantalis has complained about the problem: “At some point we need to realize our roads can’t handle all this extra traffic,” he said during one City Hall meeting in late 2021 “Whenever we do neighborhood surveys, for all the years I’ve been on this commission, the number one problem that’s always pointed out is traffic. It’s been that way since forever.”
Critics blame at least some of Fort Lauderdale’s traffic woes on the development boom that’s seen a growing skyline dominated by construction cranes and new towers.
Herbst acknowledged that all those new high-rises are likely making commutes all that much more of a nightmare — but so far, a solution has eluded the powers that be at City Hall.
“It was always the intention to concentrate development in the core downtown, but we have not built a transportation system to go along with it,” he said. “We find ourselves in a situation where we don’t have effective public transportation, so people have to use their cars to get around. Right now, we don’t have a solution.”
In an interview with the South Florida Sun Sentinel, Herbst mentioned the fact that London introduced its “congestion charge” concept years ago to discourage commuters from traveling to central London in their own cars. As a result, more people turned to public transportation to get around.
All part of the plan
City planners came up with a master plan decades ago intending to drive growth into Fort Lauderdale’s urban core, Herbst noted.
“They wanted to create a live, work, play environment. And that’s what you’re seeing,” Herbst said. “The good thing about density in the urban core is it actually reduces the number of cars on the road. It’s the urban sprawl that actually increases the number of cars on the road. I’ve heard estimates over the years that our downtown population doubles during the workday. We’re the county seat. We’re an employment center, a government center, a legal center for much of the county.”
Vice Mayor Warren Sturman, who was elected in November after running on a smart-growth platform, told the Sun Sentinel he expects to come up with more traffic solutions now that he’s the city’s appointee to the Broward Metropolitan Planning Organization. But he hasn’t had his first meeting yet.
The long-awaited redesign of Las Olas Boulevard is also one of his priorities, Sturman said.
The historic Fort Lauderdale street — 2.4 miles of tree-lined beauty stretching from downtown all the way to the beach — needs modern-day tweaks and changes to make it prettier and safer, say those pushing for the extreme makeover. The transformation of Broward County’s most famous boulevard has been in the works for nearly five years and discussed for well over a decade.
The project, expected to cost more than $100 million, is still in the design phase and possibly years away from breaking ground.
A long road to progress
Herbst says the city missed the boat by not tackling the shopping section of the Las Olas redesign at the same time the state began construction on the U.S. 1 tunnel and Tunnel Top Park.
The tunnel project got underway in September 2021 and should be completed by this April.
It’s a shame the redesign of Las Olas didn’t get underway at the same time, Herbst said.
“My fear is that we’re tearing up that street for Tunnel Top Park, and right after that we’re going to tear up the streets once again when we redesign the Las Olas corridor,” he said. “The city does not move quickly in getting things done. I think we missed a great opportunity.”
The mayor says the city had good reason for not breaking ground on the redesign of the city’s most famous boulevard: “We don’t have the design done yet. We’re still in the design phase.”
Fort Lauderdale officials also don’t know yet how they’re going to pay for the redesign.
“You have to have the design complete before you can apply for grant funding,” Trantalis said. “We don’t have the money. We don’t have the funding yet.”
Mike Weymouth, president of The Las Olas Co., the shopping district’s largest property owner, was one of the guys pleading with city officials to do the Las Olas redesign at the same time crews worked on Tunnel Top Park.
“That was my ask,” Weymouth said Friday.
What was the holdup?
“It’s government at its best,” Weymouth said. “They move so slow, it’s pathetic. People are seeing now the calamity I was trying to avoid. When we redo Las Olas, it’s going to disrupt things all over again. The upside is we are further along the path than we have been. But it’s a very long path.”
Susannah Bryan can be reached at sbryan@sunsentinel.com or on Twitter @Susannah_Bryan
