As snowbirds flock back to Vero Beach, both they and year-round residents will notice more congestion on the mainland’s major roadways, more backups at our busier intersections, and more impatient and inconsiderate motorists making a bad situation worse.
That’s what happens when more than 20,000 newcomers – many from metropolitan areas in the Northeast, Midwest and South Florida – move into a small, once-sleepy, seaside community in a 10-year span.
“Traffic volume and congestion are up,” said Rich Szpyrka, the county’s public works director, “and there’s only so much we can do about it.”
To be sure: We’re not Port St. Lucie, now Florida’s seventh-largest city with a population approaching 205,000.
We’re not even Stuart, the Treasure Coast city most often compared to Vero Beach, though the traffic congestion that accompanies South Florida’s northward migration is far more noticeable on Martin County’s roadways.
We do, however, find ourselves grappling with the traffic-engineering challenges created by the real-estate boom, which has produced a surge in residential construction that clogs our vehicular arteries with more work trucks and heavy-equipment haulers.
We’re also seeing state and county crews continuing to close lanes and intersections in an effort to complete road projects and bridge repairs needed to keep up with the growing demand for safer, more-efficient travel.
Then there’s the business-day increase in commercial traffic, such as trucks used for deliveries, home maintenance and pulling landscape-company trailers, with many service-industry workers commuting regularly from neighboring counties, where housing is more affordable.
Add to the mix the diverse makeup of our motorists – including new residents, tourists and other seasonal visitors who aren’t familiar with our roads and make sudden stops and turns, as well as those who endanger us all by driving aggressively or while texting – and it’s no surprise we’re seeing more traffic congestion.
During the busiest times of day, in fact, it can take two light changes to get through our busiest intersections. The lunch hour is bad. The morning and evening rush hours are worse.
It’s also not uncommon to encounter red lights at two, three or even four consecutive intersections, especially if you travel along U.S. 1 between 45th Street and Fourth Street during the work day.
The stretch between Aviation Boulevard and 12th Street can be particularly frustrating.
Even Indian River Boulevard, which was built to serve as a U.S. 1 bypass and provide an alternate north-south route for island residents who cross over to the mainland, has seen a considerable increase in traffic.
During our busy season, motorists using the boulevard can expect to encounter backups at intersections between the Barber and 17th Street bridges at lunchtime, during both rush hours and, sometimes, on weekends.
“We have cameras at intersections all over the county, and we monitor the flow from our traffic operations center, making adjustments to the timing of the signal changes as needed,” Szpyrka said.
“That timing is the key, and we’re usually able to keep things moving with only reasonable delays, but rush hour is rush hour,” he added. “There are so many red lights that, sometimes, nothing we do is going to make much of a difference.
“We have only so much capacity on our roadways, and we can get only so many cars through an intersection at one time.”
The dilemma should be obvious: If traffic engineers extend green signals 30 seconds to allow more northbound and southbound vehicles to pass through an intersection, motorists traveling east and west must wait longer for their opportunity.
The longer waits not only create backups, which result in less patience and more frustration, but they also prompt too many drivers to grab their cellphones.
“So the light changes and traffic starts moving, but they’re not paying attention,” Szpyrka said.
“When traffic is heavy, those few seconds can prevent another three, four or five cars from getting through the intersection.
“I can’t fix that.”
Nor can Szpryka and his staff do much to offset the congestion caused by the seemingly endless stream of Florida Department of Transportation and county road-construction projects that snarl traffic now, but are necessary to keep up with the demand for wider roadways, longer turn lanes and new bike paths.
Long-term projects are still ongoing on 43rd Avenue, 58th Avenue and 66th Avenue, as well as along State Road A1A and on the 17th Street Bridge, and they’ve all required lane closures.
“We’re doing a lot of those projects, which are needed, but they certainly add to the problem,” Szpyrka said, adding that roadwork along 58th Avenue has been especially disruptive because it has required lane closures along a corridor lined with new residential developments.
“They won’t last forever, but you’re going to be seeing these kinds of projects for quite a while.”
Brian Freeman, staff director for the county’s Metropolitan Planning Organization, said the list of road projects we can expect to see over the next decade include the:
- Widening of County Road 510 from U.S. 1 to County Road 512.
- Replacement of the Sebastian Inlet bridge.
- Extension of Aviation Boulevard across U.S. 1 to the Cleveland Clinic Indian River Hospital complex.
- Construction of a new interchange at I-95 and Oslo Road.
“The Aviation Boulevard extension will alleviate a lot of the congestion in that area, especially at the intersection of U.S. 1 and 37th Street,” Freeman said. “The Oslo interchange will help a lot, because people at south end of the county won’t need to drive north to go out State Road 60 to I-95.”
Looking further into the future, the county probably will need to add lanes in each direction to Indian River Boulevard, since the widening options along the busiest stretches of U.S. 1 in Vero Beach are restricted by businesses lining the roadway and the Florida East Coast Railway tracks to the west.
“The boulevard has gotten busier, too, but when that road was built, we thought far enough ahead to allow for expansion to six lanes,” Szpyrka said. “It’ll probably be 20 or 30 years before you see it, though.”
Both Freeman and Phil Matson, the county’s community development director, say we really don’t have a problem – that if you look at the big picture, the traffic volume and congestion now isn’t much worse than it was during the construction boom in the early 2000s.
Matson said the current real-estate boom and the residential construction it has spawned has created an “artificially high trip-generation level” that will eventually subside.
“The road-construction projects we’ve got going are a factor, but they’ll all be beneficial in the long run,” Matson said, “and when this real-estate boom abates and construction slows, which it always does, we’ll see a return to normal.”
Indeed, Matson isn’t overly concerned.
While the influx of newcomers has pushed the county’s population to more than 160,000, Matson said a large percentage of the new residents are retirees or empty-nesters – not families with children.
That means they’re not driving their children to schools, day-care providers, sports events or other extracurricular or recreational activities.
To the contrary, he said, “older people tend to chain their trips together and get everything need while they’re out, rather than go out, go home and go out again,” adding that adults without children might average five trips per day fewer than parents with children.
“And because many of these newcomers are older adults who are making fewer trips per person,” he said, “the growth we’ve seen hasn’t had much of an impact.”
In addition, Matson said, more people have been working from home, shopping online and using food-delivery services since the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.
He believes that trend will continue, even when COVID is gone.
If you’re wondering why the county doesn’t address the recent surge in traffic volume and congestion by pausing building permits, Matson said a state law enacted a decade ago – during the Great Recession – “greatly reduced” the ability of localities to restrict development for traffic-related reasons.
“We used to have a sledgehammer,” Matson said. “Now it’s a feather duster.”
Thus, the county has no choice but to absorb the growth in its population, continue to issue building permits and bolster its efforts to make the best of a difficult situation that becomes more challenging as our seasonal residents return.
“We’re widening roads and extending turn lanes, but that takes a lot of money,” Szpyrka said.
“In the meantime, people need to know that we’re doing everything we can to keep traffic moving here.”
