Guest AuthorA quarter of a century has passed since plans were completed for the Cady Way Trail, Central Florida’s first bike trail.
It took two years to turn the plan into reality, as property owners were wary of placing a bike trail on a defunct rail line near their homes. The issue dominated a neighborhood meeting in Winter Park, where I presented the plan.
“I’m afraid someone will rob my home and use the trail as a getaway,” a resident said.
“You are much more likely to have a criminal rip you off and escape on an abandoned right of way,” I replied.
I recounted how residents living next to the Pinellas Trail had the same concern, but once the bike trail was built it became a valued amenity. It raised property values, and homeowners even invested in improving their access to the trail.
Today real estate agents list 13 properties for sale on the Cady Way, a selling point for homes located on a key component of the region’s expanding bike network.
In the early 1990s, a shift in the federal funding of transportation projects made it possible to span highways and link trail systems. The bike bridge over State Road 436 was crucial to the success of the Cady Way.
I was reminded of the chaos that ensues on this six-land arterial when the flashing lights of a highway patrol car caught my eye as I biked over it on an otherwise calm Saturday afternoon. A four-car accident occupied a team of officers and paramedics, an all too common occurrence in a metropolitan area that suffers a traffic death every 44 hours. The wreckage also reminded me of the Florida Department of Transportation’s (FDOT) complicity in Florida being saddled with the nation’s highest bicyclist death rate.
Simple math explains the problem. The SR 436 bike bridge cost $5.9 million to build, a relatively minor expense given FDOT has allocated $770 million to “improving” Orlando’s SR 408-Interstate 4 interchange since 2006.
For the price of a single interchange, FDOT could build 130 bicycle bridges. To add insult to literal injury, FDOT claims the $2.1 billion being spent on Ultimate I-4 (the project widening a 21-mile stretch of interstate centered on downtown Orlando), will enhance “livability.”
Given that Metropolitan Orlando suffers the highest pedestrian death rate in the nation (followed by Tampa Bay, Jacksonville, and Miami), what FDOT means by livability is open to conjecture. It certainly does not match the definition employed in Orlando’s Greenworks Plan: “neighborhoods with complete streets and green public spaces” that “encourage walking, public gathering and neighborhood-oriented shopping activity.”
Despite ample warnings, FDOT had bred death not livability. In 1926, the great urbanist Lewis Mumford noted that engineering cities to the scale of the auto constituted “a kind of barbarism.” It covered the landscape with “a machine-made fabric, increasingly standardized, regimented, characterless, spreading outward by a process seemingly as automatic as the spread of grassland, forests, and jungles in nature.”
The soul of the city was being lost.
“Traffic and commerce are the names of the presiding deities, human beings…merely units,” Mumford wrote, “designed to run or use elaborate mechanical devices.”
FDOT’s worship of traffic efficiency has impaired our humanity. I am eager to return to Portland, Oregon, where I am spending a year living without a car in the Pearl District, a designated “pedestrian district.” My machine of choice is “Man’s Most Perfect Invention,” the bicycle.
But before leaving Orlando, I will sell my car. After experiencing the joy of livability in Portland, I cannot accept an auto-addled existence.
I will rely on my bicycle when I return to Orlando. I am just thankful that a generation ago a small group of city planners had the vision and determination to invest in humanity.
I am also betting Orlando will become more like Portland, as a new cadre of urbanists transforms the epicenter of Florida’s killing fields into a landscape of livability.
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Bruce Stephenson is the author of John Nolen: Landscape Architect & CIty Planner. He lives in Portland and is working on a new book, “Stepping into Sustainability: Living New Urbanism in Portland and Orlando.” Column courtesy of Context Florida.
