An open letter to my local neighbors…
A letter to my fellow St. Augustinians…. MEDIA Click Here for Op Ed Length and full script for press
Why there’s seemingly no improvements on Anastasia Boulevard in the last 20 years, how road planning and transportation projects are like Halloween, and what you can do now to be part of the solution …
As a northeast Floridian, born and raised in Jacksonville and Jacksonville Beach, who’s called St. Augustine home for more than 15 years, I expressly request you take the time to read my little story. I enjoy the proverbial metaphor, especially to relay complex issues. I find it helpful also with extremely difficult topics exacerbated by grief from death and destruction. You don’t need an open mind, heck, you can have a closed mind, but read top to bots. With the recent annual passing of Halloween, and yet another fatality on Anastasia Boulevard, it seems like a good time to highlight why seemingly nothing has happened on State Road A1A from the Bridge of Lions to SR 312 in the historic city in nearly 20 years.
My professional career in land planning started in 2003. I’m nearing 14 years in advocacy, more than 10 years as a transportation planner targeting strategic funding, I attained approval from the national board and passed the exams to attain a planning license, and business partner with an engineering license. I don’t pretend to know everything however, (with a small proud grin on my face also wet from tears) I feel that at least I can scratch the surface on this nebulous referred to as transportation, network, and traffic management.
But enough with what makes me somewhat qualified to write this. I’m equally pissed off, sad, and frustrated with this beloved area. Friends, family, family friends, area business staff, visitors, I know the carnage of Anastasia Boulevard. All of it. Every hit, every fatality. I’ve lost friends, erected ghost bikes, attended wakes, orchestrated meetings, delivered events that closed roads as examples of how we can move together safely. I’ve been threatened with a gun if I “dare close a lane” and had to have police presence at a public meeting on this stretch for my personal safety. I'm invested beyond a Facebook post and affected deeply. As a professional who has committed my personal time to making our public roads and infrastructure better for the human metric, I hear you, I am you, and I ask you, please read.
Let’s go back to Halloween. Let’s go back one more day to Sunday, October 30, location Instagram. I was tagged no less than 30 times by various people in the community on a social media post from our favorite grilled cheese and bacon basket restaurant in town, Sarbez. Another pedestrian killed crossing the Blvd. Many friends witnessed or are one degree of separation from the victim. I accept that my life is affected day-to-day by the death and destruction that occurs on the roads in Florida. I spent last week alone analyzing a driver being killed on impact by a train and reviewing crash data for another town to justify a new road design. At least once a month over the last 12 years I’m contacted or connected with the survivors. This past Sunday, I was playing mini golf with my son on a Sunday. When Jay was killed, I was driving and saw the skateboard and received a text moments later that no one wants “It’s Jay”. “Where’s the guys?” a text from another regarding my at that time husband and his buddies, only to discover it was Bryan. Ring ring, while walking into my parents house after seeing the red lights of an ambulance just passed the turn to go to my childhood home, I answer, “it’s my brother, is he dead?”
It’s my burden I’ve accepted, and every single time it hurts. I’ve also committed to try and determine, however incremental, a way to a better world. My son, after hearing a call with a local news reporter this week said “wow you’re going to be on the news!! For what!” I explained to him for the first time at ten years old,this part of my job. His reply “I wouldn’t want to be the person that gets called when someone dies.” I feel for those who are shocked and saddened by these events. I understand the frustration and I read the emotion of each post. I have never become hardened, tough or deterred after all this time. I do have hope and see incremental wins towards a better boulevard and greater St. Augustine. If I can get you to stop thinking for a moment about roads, safety, lights, benches, speed bumps, and arguing about speed limits and cut troughs and one way versus divided (and on and on and on for 500 comments) and how little or how much media coverage is for every collision, and flashbacks as witnesses to such horrors, and think about Halloween, it might help you help each other. And maybe, help me and other professionals like me, move the mark.
Halloween. Every year isles at local grocery stores are filled with lots of options for trick or treaters. I know I personally enjoy Nerds, Reese’s peanut butter cups, and Peanut M&M’s, not necessarily in that order. Other people like Mounds, Twix, Milky Way, Starburst, Skittles, you get my point.
The options available appeal to people's personal preference. We like to have choices. When it’s our image on the line, to give choice, to look and feel good that we were the good house on the block. But what about allergies? Teal pumpkins? Sensory concerns? Kids who can’t have candy? Do we have Toys? Rolls of pennies (does anyone do that anymore?) You could go broke trying to ensure every single person’s preference is met or even further, if every kid’s technical need is met so that all can participate in Halloween.
We could really get into the details of why kids hit the houses with large full-size bars, versus economical (financial and health) trial size, but for the sake of keeping you on task and focus, we will leave economics, health, and inclusion out of things for right now.
Next, let’s talk about where you trick-or-treat. Are you on a public street? Are you in a gated neighborhood? Do you live in a condo, thus trick-or-treat somewhere else? Did you go to a friend's house for a killer monster mash bash? What about the house when you were little and trick-or-treating that you avoided because there was an old grumpy man Withers or the creepy lady who only opened her door to let her many cats out? Or the neighborhoods you avoided because you get an uneasy feeling.
What about conflicts? What about if it was your best friend's birthday but everybody else is trick-or-treating what are you doing then? What if there was a death in the family and that became priority? Or what if you had a really cool video game that you wanted to purchase when you were a kid and had to make a decision between spending your allowance on an amazing costume or buying that game?
Now, think of all the levels of decisions to make or dictate options for Halloween. Pile on the memes mocking teal pumpkins, the debate of chocolate versus fruity treats, is your costume going to be accepted by your peers and how that affected your individual decision. Did you trick or treat from home, leave the bowl out for people to self-select, or turn your lights off and drive to another neighborhood? And that’s just Halloween, a frivolous, supposed to be fun, and silly holiday where you dress up, knock on strangers' doors, eat candy, and have a good time.
“Ok Heather, thanks for the Halloween decision tree, what does that have to do with Anastasia Boulevard, or any other place?” Everything. Halloween is every single public project where everyone wants what they want, all at once, all the time. The elements of Halloween are the same for public projects and have everything to do with how decisions are made or not made with a major difference. Public projects must do the most for the most with fixed resources, in the public eye, and require significant tradeoffs. Everyone still wants their perfect costume, full size Kit-kat bar, ideal neighborhood but replace those items with keep my commute times, street fights over parking spaces, and general lack of understanding of how the government runs day to day or projects are paid for.
Timing is everything
#WeAreTheProblem
#WeAreTheSolution
#WeOweItToOurselve
There were over 500 comments on Sunday. Some arguments on what to do, most demanding something be done, and for me, add memories surfacing from years of public meetings with locals attending derailing efforts through selfish arguments. It highlights how emotions can ignite a reaction but, without something to work towards combined with the unwillingness to accept tradeoffs, nothing changes. Instead of salty versus sweet, avoiding Mr. Withers or deciding between personal purchases, it’s a commentary on the greater needs of a public system and the tradeoffs that must occur and what happens when a plan can’t be adopted. Nothing, nothing happens. Major efforts to work on a better boulevard have been lost to personal and political dialogue because of an unwillingness to accept that our public property IS NOT ONLY ABOUT YOU. Yes, all CAPS, read that again, IT IS NOT ONLY ABOUT YOU. It’s also not “them” or “they”. You are them so we have to find a way.
500 comments for one location on a state road, in an agency (FDOT District 2) that manages 18 counties and approximately 12,000 square miles every day. Commenters pointing fingers at this agency over that (which for me is kind of funny when an agency that doesn’t exist gets called out, there is not in fact a St. Johns County Department of Transportation, #factcheck.) Add on that we don’t have enough money to pay for our own needs locally, the political commentary around financing of projects (yes this is a nod at the sales tax), and then everything else in front of officials and community leaders (who are not transportation planners or engineers) including homelessness, electricity, flooding, what do you think happens? Nothing.
This expensive project, think $15 - $20 million per mile to fix, gets put to the sideline time and time again. There are so many needs in our community pulling on staff and leadership, city, county and state, it just gets tabled. It’s no one entity or agency’s fault, we all have a role to play. Sure, public projects take a long time, as a professional planner, we have dialogue about process improvement everyday. But checks and balances of procurement and policy is not the culprit, its us and we need to plan to address the issues.
“Dear lord Heather, are you saying there’s nothing that can be done?” I’m saying exactly the opposite. I personally love all the input, the data points, the debate, the desire, the passion. KEEP IT GOING! Halloween is over, I bet many of you are thinking about how next year will be even better, analyzing location, type of candy, costume choices. So why not commit part of your daily life to making our community better? Scathing emails to staff, pointing fingers at politicians, accusing your neighbor of being myopic for wanting to ride their bike but your idea of streetlights is better, just cut it out. It’s about as useful as yelling at the cashier for the price of meat. You’re not wrong, they’re not right. We are in this together, a bowl of mixed-up candy, toys, rolled pennies, that need to be provided for.
I have seen many wonderful public projects achieved once a plan is conceived, the community can rally behind, and the agencies can identify funding for. Locally think about the fact that we have the Amphitheater, the recent King Street Mobility plan with the state, the St. Johns River to Sea Loop, West King area Habitat Housing neighborhood, the MOD for US1 and King Street!!! It takes public private partnership across many agencies to make these happen. A crosswalk improvement on Anastasia Blvd is eminent that was born of a request almost decade ago I was part of, supported by surveys executed by the business association I partook in, and then kept following up on since. Imagine if we had a corridor plan at the same time? Where could we be in the next ten years if we build a plan? It isn’t easy, trade offs occur, it's worth the work, and the wait.
What can you do?
Decide. Decide to show up to more than one meeting or Facebook post. Write a letter with why you want what you want without target practice against someone else’s request. Take the surveys! Watch the public agency social media as much as you watch TikTok’s of chinchillas wearing scarves and comment on Pete Melfi’s mustache choices. Learn about how projects are funded, voted in, zoned, constructed. It’s interesting stuff. But its up to you to decide to stick with it.
Commit. Commit to reading more than one bullet point, more than the headline, more than the comments, and learn. Everything is public record but requires you to learn more. Do not look for data that only supports your position, rather research what goes into the entire decision for something you think might work. Be ready to commit to tradeoffs, ITS NOT ABOUT YOU, remember? Commit to getting less than meeting in the middle sometimes. Commit to losing selfish objectives with a few minutes of delay to create more safety and comfort. Commit to the human metric and not yourself as the only priority. A commitment to this will see communities thrive economically too.
Succeed. Find satisfaction in incremental successes. A public meeting is had, awesome! A planning study is underway…. Woohoo. A project is on the budget, send it. A project is completed, have a ribbon cutting! Then show up again. Momentum begins somewhere. The more mass, the more momentum, the higher the probability something will happen. But instead of being against something, putting so much energy into being against a project, a place, an idea, we must decide what we are for, and work towards that to make a change.
As for Anastasia Boulevard, it’s again a haunted house. Someone is dead. People are angry and afraid. Letters will be sent, Facebook wars will be waged, tears will flow, and then on to the next thing. A crosswalk project for Zorayda and Anastasia is imminent, scheduled to be built in the beginning of the year. But what about the rest of the boulevard? The connectivity, the lighting, access, parking, landscaping?
Decide, commit, succeed. It’s the only way. Or decide to let professionals do their job. Admit that you know you want (insert feature, gondolas? Electric automated transit?) put it in the record, and then admit to yourself you have no idea how that happens, you aren’t going to invest time into it for whatever reason, and go live your life. Please don’t show up to blast a mobility project because YOU don’t like it for your personal commute. Accept change. No one is eliminating cars, period, at least not in my lifetime. Commit to reading the study findings and adopting recommendations in the WE. And please, show up when we succeed. Otherwise, it will be another 20 years before anything on this public road changes.
Only one small box of Nerds….. sigh
For me, I will champion increasing the volume of Nerds per household at Halloween (only one trial size box!!). I have decided to continue to work towards a more mobile community, sacrificing commute times for quality of life and safety. I will commit to educating whoever I can about how this works, why it’s important, what are the options, the tradeoffs, the costs, the funding strategies, the policy needs, and how this creates a thriving, lovely place to live, work and play. And do I love a good party! Let’s succeed because at the end of the day, fun is fun, and we haven’t had a ribbon cutting east of the Matanzas since Pax and Pele were unveiled (east side Lions) in 2016, its time. My business partner and I have committed to reengaging the Anastasia Boulevard business efforts altruistically as we continue our professional projects in St. Johns County. The question is, who’s coming with me? #LetsGO
Sincerely,
Heather Lane Neville, AICP
Mom, strategic planner, soccer coach, ocean lover, runner,
Heather is an advocate for safer and healthier communities, owner of W.e. Are Planning and Director of the boutique Planning and Engineering firm, DDEC, with an office in the Historic City of St. Augustine on the square. She and her fellow passionate professionals in planning and engineering are dedicated to improving the way the world moves. We are proud to work across the state of Florida in coastal communities and use the transportation network to elevate areas through safety, resiliency, economic development, and thoughtful design. More at www.ddec.com.