Longboat Key News and Sarasota City News encourages Letters to the Editor on timely issues. Please email to: letters@lbknews.com or mail to PO Box 8001, Longboat Key, FL 34228. We also print letters sent to Town Hall that address Longboat Key issues. We reserve the right to edit.
Bridge compliance
To: Longboat Key Commissioner Sarah Karon
Richard Abuza, here. I made a comment at the Longboat North meeting about the proposed bridge you asked me to follow up on.
First, I want to thank you so much for your dedication to Longboat and being willing to serve our Town. I serve on two City Boards up in Massachusetts, and I know it sometimes is a difficult task. I appreciate your support of Longboat North and your participation in our meetings. I am the Condo president of Northgate of Longboat Key. Northgate has the homes most affected by the proposed bridge.
My apologies. I rechecked the slope formulas and the proposed mid-level bridge is technically within ADA slope parameters.
However, just because something is technically in compliance does not mean it is practically in compliance. Just ask anyone who has pushed someone in a wheelchair up a 3% grade incline for a short distance–let alone nearly 1/5 of a mile. That can be incredibly exhausting–but what can be even scarier, is trying to hold back a wheelchair going down a slope gathering momentum for almost a quarter of a mile–with no level place to bring yourself to safety.
There are other pedestrian and bike safety issues with any high bridge design which we detailed in our comments to FDOT. I can provide them if you want. On the ecological front, for the hundreds and hundreds of cars every day that cross this bridge, for every foot of elevation, an internal combustion engine has to strain to push thousands of pounds of steel up every foot of that incline. Very little of that energy is recouped on the slope down.
In traffic the ecological cost is even worse, since the physics of motion is that starting a body (car) from a stop requires far more energy than keeping it moving. Every time every car stops, extra energy is used and pollution is created overcoming the inertia of a resting body. With each stop in traffic, that energy cost and increase in pollution is magnified by having to push a car up a hill. Even electric cars have to exert extra energy in this same situation, and that electricity comes at an ecological cost. Every bit of raising the bridge height is a hidden tax on the citizens who use the bridge in addition to taxing the environment.
No new bridge of any size or height will do anything to solve our fundamental problem–gridlocked traffic. If the bridge has to be replaced (which I am not sure is a valid assumption) at least the low bridge does not create safety, and ecological and visual disaster.
Thank you for your consideration of this important issue.
Richard Abuza
Longboat Key
Bridge compliance
To: Richard Abuza
I appreciate your insights on both points. They add to the accumulating “common sense” data that will hopefully encourage FDOT to fully consider our community’s specific point of view. Accessibility, air quality, neighborhood feel, environmental sensitivity… all of these priorities can and should be part of the agency’s design considerations, along with traffic flow and safety. It’s a beautiful pass, let’s keep it that way.
Sarah Karon
Commissioner
Town of Longboat Key
Two weeks later….how’s the bay?
To: Longboat Key Commission, Sarasota City Commission
On June 11th, our region was hit by a substantial rain event, as we discussed in the last Director’s Note. We are now about two weeks after that event, and it’s worth asking “How is the bay doing?’ Because in the first days after that rain event, it was not looking good, as described in that last communication. Stormwater runoff and algal blooms and fish kills are not good for the bay’s health, but there’s a difference between an episodic stressor and chronic ones. The large loss of seagrass meadows and fish habitat that occurred in the lower bay between about 2014 and 2018 didn’t happen because of a couple of days or weeks of bad water quality, it was because water quality was bad for years. Literally – years.
So how “n