ANNA MARIA – Pine Avenue may soon be in for a traffic and safety-related makeover.
The city of Anna Maria is contracting an engineering firm to conduct a detailed traffic and safety study of the Pine Avenue corridor that also includes Spring and Magnolia avenues.
On Thursday, May 13, the city commission authorized the $50,274 project fee associated with an agenda item referred to as “Reimagining Pine Avenue.”
The study results and recommendations will be presented to the commission and the public on July 22.
“We’ve been talking about this for some time, and this is a great way to use some of the money we get from the American Rescue Plan,” Mayor Dan Murphy said.
He then introduced Gerry Traverso from the George F. Young civil engineering and surveying firm. Traverso serves as vice president of transportation engineering for the firm that’s headquartered in St. Petersburg and has offices in Tampa, Lakewood Ranch and elsewhere in the state. Traverso has more than 25 years of traffic engineering experience and is also a certified project manager who lives in Bradenton and is familiar with the area.
“We know the city of Anna Maria is not the same as the city of North Port. We don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all approach. We tailor each approach to the specific characteristics of the community,” he said.
Traverso said the Pine Avenue corridor is an interconnected network of roads that includes Spring Avenue and Magnolia Avenue. The study will help develop solutions to mitigate and alleviate congestion, while also looking at how to more safely accommodate pedestrians, bikes, scooters, golf carts and other alternative modes of transportation.
The study will also include recommendations for delivery trucks and other business‐related traffic along the Pine Avenue corridor.
“We know that we have a lot of commercial activity on Pine Avenue. We don’t want to hurt them in any way,” Traverso said.
Stormwater and drainage conditions will be observed and analyzed. That information will be used to help alleviate rainwater ponding that forces pedestrians and bicyclists further out into the streets.
The scope of services includes data collection, traffic counts and the analysis of vehicular turning movements in the study area intersections. The study will also produce a topographic survey for Spring and Magnolia avenues from Gulf Drive to South Bay Boulevard.
Data and input will be gathered from residents, business owners, visitors and elected officials through public meetings and the creation of a project website.
“The more you involve the community, the more buy-in you get,” Traverso said.
Results and recommendations
The study will produce up to four alternatives for each recommended solution, with cost estimates and implementation timeframes included.
“One alternative might be cheap and fast, but what is the return investment? Or do we do a different alternative that will take more time and money but provides a longer-lasting solution? We’ll do a public presentation, and we’ll show you all the alternatives and the pros and cons of each one,” Traverso said.
“We can go from simple to complex,” he said, mentioning striped parking lines or lowering the speed limit as simple solutions.
He said making Pine Avenue a one-way street going south and Magnolia Avenue a one-way street going north would be a more extreme solution.
Each recommendation will include a no-action option that analyzes what happens if nothing is done to address a particular problem: “They stay the same or they get even worse,” Traverso said.
Murphy said the July presentation date allows the commission time to include any desired actions in the 2021-22 fiscal year budget.
Commissioner Joe Muscatello said he doesn’t want this to be another case of a $50,000 study sitting on the shelf with no action taken.
“We’ve seen that too often,” he said.
Muscatello said if American Rescue Plan funds can’t be used, the commission needs to find the money elsewhere.
“We need to take this seriously and move as quickly as we can,” he said.
Commissioner Jon Crane asked Traverso if the study will take into account the unpredictable behavior of visitors when engineering potential solutions.
“We have tourists who come here and they drive crazy, and they ride bikes crazy and they cross streets without crosswalks – people who act normal at home but don’t act safely here,” Crane said.
Traverso referenced a tourist-heavy area in Treasure Island where visitors drink in the bars on one side of the street and then try to cross a four-lane road to get back to their beachfront accommodations.
He said several technical solutions were explored, but the best solution came from a landscape architect who suggested planting shrubs to create a natural barrier that forces pedestrians to cross in designated areas. Public Works Manager Dean Jones said hedges used in that manner are an effective low-cost solution that he would support in some locations.
Former commissioner Doug Copeland attended Thursday’s meeting. While in office, he often expressed concerns about the current configuration of Pine Avenue, which results in vehicles backing out into the street and includes areas with no sidewalks.
During public input, Copeland said, “ I want to applaud you for taking this on. It’s become a major issue. Our infrastructure was designed back in the early 1900s by the Anna Maria Development Company. It served the city well but it’s a hundred years old. We do need something dramatic and I hope you’ll move forward with this.”
