Southwest Florida offers us sun, sea and nature. It’s such an enticing place to live that it’s easy to overlook what we no longer create: great towns and cities.
Our economy largely relies on serving newcomers, yet suddenly it’s not clear that the influx will continue even when the recession ends.
Suburban development patterns require affordable fuel and endless road expansions. The outlook for fuel is bleak, and how much wider can our roads get? The days of workers from Lehigh Acres making the daily drive to Collier County may never return.
New construction will be sluggish until the glut of vacant houses and stores are absorbed by newcomers. This economic pause is a great time to reconsider how we grow.
How can we make Southwest Florida a better place to live while adjusting to these new economic realities?
First, I believe that the days of expanding our communities ever further outward are over, due to high fuel costs and the traffic congestion which results from everyone needing to drive long distances to get anywhere.
Second, our local economy can revive if it begins producing the compact communities that our new era is making attractive again. We can accommodate newcomers by redeveloping abandoned shopping centers, obsolete mobile home parks and skipped-over vacant tracts. We don’t need to keep paving over nature or farmland.
Third, our systems for planning and regulating new development must be reconfigured from the ground up so that they produce great towns and cities rather than the isolated subdivisions of our recent past.
Great cities are collections of great neighborhoods. What makes a neighborhood great?
Great neighborhoods have streets that encourage walking and bicycling as well as driving.
Great neighborhoods are compact enough to have neighborhood schools, parks and shopping for daily needs.
Great neighborhoods have a variety of housing — single-family homes, townhouses, garage apartments and condos. Why should every house on a block be the same size and look alike? Why should families or retirees have to move away just because they need a larger or smaller house?
And great neighborhoods have access to public transit, allowing independence to those who don’t drive, especially the elderly and the young. Even those with cars shouldn’t have to drive for every trip they make.
Can we have convenient public transit in Southwest Florida? Conventional wisdom says you can’t have transit without compact neighborhoods — yet history shows that compact neighborhoods emerge around transit.
A new group, Reconnecting Lee County, is exploring a long-range plan for compact, walkable neighborhoods connected with public transportation. The diverse private citizens who formed Reconnecting Lee County believe that our region’s growth cannot rely solely on private vehicles. On first glance we look like the usual suspects — many in politics, law, planning, engineering and real estate — but a fair number of participants are bicycle proponents, civic representatives, environmental activists or “impossible to classify.”
One concept for a future transit network for Lee County is presented here.
Today the rail line that connects Bonita Springs to Fort Myers is used only for occasional freight and excursion trains. If electric “light rail” service were added, passengers could travel smoothly and quietly on a route parallel to U.S. 41.
Lee County officials are already seeking grants to acquire the railroad right of way and improve the existing tracks.
Additional transit routes could tie this network to other parts of Lee County such as the beaches, the international airport, Edison State College and Florida Gulf Coast University. These additional routes could be served by different kinds of vehicles:
* Standard or express buses.
* Small European streetcars that operate like buses but are powered by electricity and roll on rails embedded in regular streets.
* Long, rubber-tired buses that operate like trains on bus-only lanes.
The main north-south light-rail system could extend into Collier County if new tracks were built to replace one of the two rail lines that once connected Naples to the nation’s rail system.
Our governments plan boldly for new roads that might be needed in the future. Local officials must start planning just as boldly for public transit.
Learn more about compact walkable neighborhoods from the Congress for the New Urbanism, www.cnu.org and www.cnuflorida.org; learn about the potential for public transportation and transit-oriented development at www.ReconnectingAmerica.org.
And keep up with local progress by visiting www.ReconnectingLee.org.
Spikowski is a veteran land-use planner in Southwest Florida. He operates the Fort Myers consulting firm Spikowski Planning Associates and is a founding member of Reconnecting Lee County.
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