Most people who are involved with road planning understand a simple truth.
YOU CANNOT BUILD YOUR WAY OUT OF CONGESTION!
The Florida Turnpike folks, however, still live in an alternative universe where building new roads makes congestion disappear.
Anyway, that seemed to be the message on one of the information boards (see above) at the first of two open houses held to, provide information on a proposed toll road that will wind through eastern Polk County between the Dundee area and an area north of Davenport.
The next open house will be Thursday in Davenport from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Tom Fellows Community Center on North Boulevard.
There will be a formal public hearing sometime next spring on this phase of the road study, which is scheduled to wrap up later in 2027.
The main claim behind the push for this road is based on some indisputable facts, which is that U.S, 27 and other roads will become more congested in the future as more development occurs in that section of Polk County.
The question though is whether this detour is a cost-effective response.
It will be interesting to see what kind of origin-destination studies have been or will be conducted in addition to all of the other studies that will be required if this project is to proceed someday.
That is, will enough people actually use it to justify the hundreds of millions of dollars that will be involved.
There are other questions that are still unanswered such as how many homes and businesses will have to be bulldozed to make way for the road and how its presence will affect the management of nearby conservation lands and more.
So far all they have used are the same tired rationalizations we read for every new project that comes along, accompanied by the claims about the harms that not building it will cause.
Transportation demand, real or imagined was discussed earlier.
Regional connectivity is another, though if you look at a current map, everything seems to be pretty well connected.
They talk about evacuation routes, ignoring the fact that the road will take motorists from one section of a congested highway system to another in a section of the state where they usually advise people to shelter in place. This also assumes this road will be congestion free.
Then there’s always the freight mobility argument, which put another way would mean there would be more truck traffic and air pollution coming to an area that has not had that problem in the past.
This project has been a boondoggle since it was first proposed more than a decade ago and it is still a boondoggle.
Support the NO BUILD alternative.