Last issue we walked through what the Transportation Element is and which four institutional layers — Local Comp Plan, MPO/TPO, FDOT, and Federal — decides what gets built. If you missed it, your local government does not fully control the transportation network in your community.

I have been debating what to talk about next on this subject.  When I talk to friends about all this, I get these questions: So, why do transportation problems keep recurring, regardless of how much money is spent? Why does congestion get worse even after “improvements”? Why do “safety improvements” never really make things safer? Why are transit buses in suburban areas never full? Why do bike lanes rarely have people riding in them? Why doesn’t the local government build all the infrastructure first, then approve development?

For something sensical to come out of my brain regarding all this, yes - I took a long pause from the last newsletter. This is a big and complicated story, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell it, but let’s start with planning.  

Two street network patterns dominate American communities, and they produce dramatically different transportation outcomes, the traditional urban grid, and the suburban network.

The traditional urban grid — small blocks, multiple parallel routes, streets that connect to other streets in both directions — distributes traffic across many parallel paths. When one street has an incident, traffic diverts. When a driver wants to make a short trip, multiple direct routes are available. The grid is a redundant network with many route options. This existed in most every town, big and small, prior to WWII. You could walk to school, live above the coffee shop, and get what you need by walking or taking a bus.

In later decades, a more defined street hierarchy took over, generally recommending thoroughfare roads every ¼ to ½ mile. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) "Green Book" (A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets) recommended this standard with larger blocks. This was in part because of post-WWII creation of the interstate system and the suburban housing boom, where suburban neighborhoods had local streets, not thoroughfare roads, and carried limited traffic. Land uses started to be separated. Areas were zoned and limited to residential, commercial, or industrial, etc. This created the need for auto ownership to get to school, work, etc.

The Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Transportation Planning Handbook historically recommended a hierarchy where arterials are spaced roughly 1 mile apart, collectors spaced roughly 1/2 mile apart, and locals are everything in between.

This grid logic (1 mile / 1/2 mile / local) mirrors the old Jeffersonian section-line survey grid across most of the US (640-acre sections, half mile and quarter-mile section lines), which is part of why the number feels so "standard" — it fits neatly onto the underlying land survey grid that a lot of American subdivision and road network platting is based on anyway.

Modern residential subdivisions are typically made up of houses only and use local streets, which feed into collectors, which feed into arterials — funnels all traffic to a smaller number of higher-capacity roads. Many high growth communities in the sunbelt were caught off-guard, especially as the baby boomers started to retire in droves and flooded their communities with new residential subdivisions.

The following image is a thoroughfare plan for Sample City. Been there? I have not. The growth originally occurred mainly on the river within the city pre-WWII, where the older urban grid originated. As the time passed and roads were extended, as the land use preferences and zoning changed to more suburban design, the grid got broader. Fewer roads are relied up on to carry the weight of development.

Many jurisidictions lacked the initiative to plan for either extending the existing traditional urban grid or having a well laid out future suburban road network. In many areas, the roads were done piecemeal or they just kept focusing on widening the same collector and arterial roads the new residential subdivisions were built off. This does not help with redundancy for travel, which existed in the traditional urban grid.

Another factor that makes it challenging to extend the tighter urban grid deals with water. Especially in Florida, where there are extensive rivers, creeks, and wetlands. Wetland regulations also made avoiding wetlands a priority as they were expensive to mitigate impacts to.  You can see in the road designs, where starting around the 1990’s, new roads got very circuitous in design. Always steering around wetland areas. Around 1985, stormwater regulations came into effect. Meaning, when you built a certain amount of impervious surface area, you had to construct ponds to capture the runoff. This made road construction more expensive. These factors also impacted residential subdivision design.  Another factor includes dealing with flood plain regulations. Depending upon the topography and flood zone, new roads may require extensive fill and be constructed above the base elevation of everything around it.

These are a few additional factors that were not around generally before the late 80’s that impacted the extension of the urban grid. For a local government, it was easier to just focus on the roads you had and make them wider over time. If you had some state roads running through your community, even better. Load all your new development along those. Let the state fund any projects to add capacity on those roads.

Areas where water is less of an issue, have the ability to build and plan for a more robust grid. The following is an example from Plano, TX.

Transportation Elements typically show a future road plan. MPO’s also show these road plans in their long-range transportation plans (LRTPs). For roads specifically, a long-range transportation plan should show what the existing roadway network looks like today (e.g., road classification, ROW width, and number of lanes). It should identify what thoroughfare roads need be widened in the future and show extensions of these roads into growth areas or new roads in those areas.

Having a transportation plan with the proper amount of future planned arterials and collectors laid out in future growth areas ahead of time is challenging for a bunch of reasons as follows.

First, even though it can be shown in your adopted plan, the right-of-way isn't real until it's dedicated or acquired from the private property owners. A future collector or arterial shown on a Transportation Element map or Mobility Plan is just a line on paper until the right-of-way is actually reserved, dedicated, or purchased. In a 20-year horizon, the land it crosses is often still in agricultural use, may have wetlands, rare flora or fauna, or held by someone with no interest in developing. Most Florida communities have right-of-way reservation and future right of way setback provisions, but they are implemented when growth actually occurs along those roads.

Ideally a local government would work ahead of time on these corridors. They would coordinate with the landowners, get buy in, do some preliminary engineering to determine a general alignment (e.g., go around the wetlands, cemeteries, and give the eagle’s nest a wide berth, etc.).  Rights of first refusal agreements could also be put in place. Jurisdictions that don't pursue these planning efforts aggressively, leave the map unrealized or with fewer future roads than the community will eventually need, especially if the land use plan is for suburban development.

Road planning is substantially easier when you are dealing with fewer and larger property owners. Typically, many like the idea of developing their property at some future point and are willing to have the conversation. If your road plan goes through their property, they are also more likely to successfully address any rezoning criteria related to transportation. The property values fronting a throughfare road are higher than those not, generally speaking. This could be advantageous to a farmer who may sell to developers someday.

Second, you're predicting where growth will happen, not just how much. Population and traffic forecasts (via the Shimberg Center, BEBR, or metro MPO models) can reasonably project how much growth is coming, but where it lands depends on private development decisions, land assemblage, city/county approvals, and market timing that shift over decades. What planned density or intensity via the city/county future land use plan is also a factor with the roads. A collector network sized and located for one growth pattern can be obsolete if development jumps to a different quadrant of the county — which happens constantly in fast-growing sunbelt counties.

Third, comprehensive plans and land use regulations get amended faster than roads get built.  Florida's plan amendment cycle (especially after the 2011 Community Planning Act loosened concurrency requirements) means land use and zoning can change relatively easily, perhaps putting new growth in areas once planned for continued agriculture. Road construction is capital-intensive. A future 4 lane collector road shown on a map adopted in 2005 may still be incomplete or only have 2 lanes in 2026 while the land uses around it have already built out — at which point retrofitting the ROW means buying developed parcels instead of reserving vacant ones.

Fourth, does your jurisdiction have the political will to "draw a line through someone's land"? Showing a future arterial on an adopted map in your comp plan effectively tells a landowner their property will someday be crossed by a road, which can trigger objections, potential claim of takings, and pressure on elected officials — especially from politically connected landowners. It's much easier politically to defer the decision ("we'll figure out alignment when it's platted") than to commit to a specific corridor 20 years out. In Florida, this factor is responsible for traffic congestion in many of the coastal counties.

Fifth, grid connectivity may require cooperation of separate parcels/owners. Unlike a single arterial widening, a functional grid depends on connections platting through multiple adjacent parcels over time, often owned by different people who may develop on different schedules. If Owner A's development doesn't stub a collector to the property line because Owner B hasn't platted yet, the connection may never happen — the classic "collector that becomes a dead end" problem unless it becomes a local government capital improvement project and eminent domain is utilized.

Sixth, funding mechanisms are reactive, not proactive. You have probably heard the NIMBY argument, don’t approve anything until the infrastructure is in place. Well, this is not how local government funding works. Local governments get the money for roads from a variety of sources. In general gas taxes mostly pay for maintenance in most FL communities and are a regressive tax. You never have enough to cover maintenance, so forget capacity adding improvements. Put this question as a side note – how many customers per linear foot of infrastructure does your local government have paying the bills to maintain and eventually replace?

Some communities have adopted an infrastructure sales tax, which is helpful especially if you have tourists to split the bill. Many communities use transportation impact fees (or mobility fees), which are collected after development occurs. Concurrency regulation changes in FL Statutes now put the onus on the local government for capacity adding improvements. FL Statutes have adopted more of a developer “pay their mobility fees” (another name for transportation impact fees) and go build. This “pay and go” mindset leaves the local government holding the bag for expensive road projects and usually not enough money to build them.

However, if you have a large landowner / developer that is more of a possibility. In Florida, this used to occur when Developments of Regional Impact (DRIs) were the law of the land and large projects went thru this state review process. It got developers long term entitlements, better ensured local governments the infrastructure they needed, and provided long term certainty for the decision makers about what was happening, when, and provided development and infrastructure thresholds to make sure developer provided improvements aligned. Unfortunately, DRI’s are no longer required in the FL Statutes.

Smart local governments will leverage the private sector developers to build the necessary infrastructure instead of them. In my experience, the private sector builds the same infrastructure at a 20-30% lesser cost. Using proportionate share and local development agreements, local governments can get the private sector to build improvements while the developer’s construction crews are building their infrastructure. Impact fees credits are part of the local development agreement and used to get infrastructure built right the first time – more on this later.

You were probably hoping for me to talk about how roads get designed (lane counts, cross-sections, level of service, access management) but instead get why they never get built as planned. Good thing this is all free. You now know what the Transportation Element is (Part 1), what a Transportation Plan for roads is and what should be in them, so we are going to keep going down this road (pun intended). Stay tuned to what’s next. There is so much to unpack here.