Key West Commissioners approve lower speed limit, higher parking fees

Key West Commissioners approve lower speed limit, higher parking fees

BY PRU SOWERS

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

Changes are coming to a roadway near you.

After only six months of work, the volunteer Parking and Alternative Transportation Group (PATG) has delivered to city commissioners a remarkable 25 recommendations aimed at reducing traffic congestion and increasing parking availability for Key West residents. While nine of the recommendations are aimed at longer-term fixes, 16 involve changes that can made quickly, including increasing the number of residential parking spots, hiking hourly charges in parking lots and at meters, and implementing one standard speed limit throughout the city.

City commissioners recently made those three changes, voting to apply a one-speed-fits-all 20-mph maximum on all Key West streets except those owned and maintained by Monroe County, where the current speed limits will remain the same. Those county roads include Flagler Street up to 1^st Street and North and South Roosevelt Boulevard. In addition, the so-called “collector,” or main thoroughfares of Eaton and Flagler (below 1^st Street) and Truman Avenue will have a 25-mph speed limit.

“It’s going to take a stepped-up enforcement effort by the Key West Police Department,” PATG Chair Roger McVeigh told commissioners, saying that signage will not be enough to convince drivers to obey the new speed limits.

While slower speeds may be good or bad news depending on the driver, local car owners can look forward to having more resident-only parking spaces. Based on PATG recommendations, city commissioners agreed that 50 percent of parking spaces on residential streets will be reserved for cars with residential parking stickers. And in blocks adjacent to paid public parking lots or garages, 75 percent of the street spaces will be resident-only.

“Because we are really taking away from our paid parking by allowing non-residential spots close to those paid parking spots,” McVeigh said. The changes will increase the total number of resident parking spaces from 1,074 to 1,202.

Perhaps the most controversial PATG recommendation that commissioners voted to approve was to raise the hourly parking fee in public lots and at meters to $4. Currently, some public lots charge $3 or $3.50 an hour, while others had already made the jump to $4. The move will raise an additional $1.26 million annually. In Fiscal 2016, Key West collected $7.2 million in parking revenue6: $3.7 million from paid street parking and $3.5 million from parking lots.

Stating that the higher parking fee will affect tourists and seasonal visitors more than year-round residents, commissioners also agreed to the hike to avoid a tax increase in the just-approved fiscal year 2019 city budget. Facing a shortfall of $418,000 to achieve rollback, the amount of revenue the city would need to collect to raise the same amount it did through property taxes the previous year, the higher parking fees will cover that amount. The remaining $842,000 will be used to increase the salaries of the lowest-paid city workers as well as restore the city’s reserve fund, which has been drained this past year by expenses related to Hurricane Irma.

As a result of the revenue expected from higher parking rates, the $185 million FY 2019 city budget calls for a mileage rate of 2.2074, which equates to $220 in property taxes for every $100,000 of assessed value.

Other PATG recommendations include replacing damaged bike racks and adding additional racks to encourage drivers to hit the road on two wheels. Coordinating delivery truck routes to minimize congestion, incentivizing car sharing and designing roads to include space for cars, bikes and pedestrians were also part of the PATG report.

“Traffic congestion studies have already shown that we’re past capacity and have been awhile for our traffic carrying,” said Eric Detwiler, PATG Vice-Chairman. “Twelve to 20,000 cars are going past the traffic triangle every single day. And in season, it probably shouldn’t take us a half hour to get from one side of this island to the other.”

“What we’ve learned is there really is no one solution and no silver bullet,” added Chairman McVeigh. “It’s really going to take a long-term, multi-year effort doing lots of little things year by year. And I think we can really reduce traffic congestion and come up with some solutions.”

Other members of PATG – the group has disbanded as ordered; its parking and alternative transportation responsibilities transferred to the Key West Sustainability Advisory Board – include Greg Davila, who was just elected as a city commissioner, Dana Day, Wally Moore, Jr., James Sutton and Allan Tidball.

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