—Sarasota has spent the past several years telling its drivers to slow down. The city lowered speed limits on Ringling Boulevard. It striped bike lanes across town in the name of intermodal transportation. It slowed traffic over the John Ringling Causeway, installed speed tables at St. Armands, and adopted a complete streets philosophy that treats every corridor as shared space for walkers, cyclists and buses.
—Now, in the fine print of the most sweeping rewrite of its transportation rules in a generation, the city is preparing to tell those same drivers something else: that total congestion, 100 percent of a road’s capacity, bumper to bumper, is officially acceptable in the downtown core.
—That number, a maximum “volume-to-capacity” ratio of 1.0, is at the heart of a newly surfaced exchange of correspondence between Sarasota resident and City Commission candidate Ron Kashden and City Commissioner Jen Ahearn-Koch, an exchange that ended with Ahearn-Koch forwarding her concerns straight to the city manager. Together, the letters open a new front in the fight over the draft Transportation Chapter of the Sarasota City Plan as it barrels toward adoption hearings this fall.
—The Letter That Landed on the City Manager’s Desk
—Kashden attended the city’s Sept. 1 community workshop on the draft chapter at the Bayfront Community Center. The next day, he filed a formal public comment with the city, then sent a copy to Ahearn-Koch with a short note: “I saw you at yesterday’s workshop and thought you’d be interested in the public comment that I submitted today.”
—Ahearn-Koch’s reply did not equivocate.
“Thank you Ron for sharing this analysis and recommendation,” she wrote. “I too am concerned about the high V/C ratios proposed as it was my understanding that anything over .85 or .9 was very close to standstill and generally not acceptable per safety. People become anxious at standstill and that increased anxiety generally translates to a decrease in safe driving behaviour.”
—Then came the sentence that turns a constituent email into a live political document: “I have copied the City Manager, as well, on this email.”
—Ahearn-Koch was one of two commissioners, along with Kyle Battie’s colleague Debbie Trice, to vote against transmitting the draft chapter to the state on Aug. 3. Her written endorsement of Kashden’s analysis signals that the 3-2 split that sent the document to Tallahassee is likely to reappear, and possibly sharpen, when the chapter comes back for final adoption.
—From Report Cards to Ratios: What Is Actually Changing
—For decades, Sarasota, like most Florida cities, graded its roads the way teachers grade students, with letters A through F. Level of Service A meant free-flowing traffic. Level of Service F meant failure: stop-and-go, over-capacity gridlock. Development approvals were tied to those grades through a system called concurrency, which in plain terms meant a project could be slowed, conditioned or reshaped if the roads around it could not handle the traffic it would generate.
—The rewrite throws out the report card. In its place comes the volume-to-capacity ratio, a decimal that measures how full a road is. A ratio of 0.5 means a road is carrying half the traffic it was built for. A ratio of 1.0 means every last unit of capacity is spoken for.
—The draft sets the maximum allowable ratio at 1.0, complete saturation, for the downtown core, with slightly lower ceilings of 0.95 and 0.90 elsewhere in the city. Traffic concurrency, the mechanism that let road conditions constrain development, would be repealed. And throughout the document, critics note, obligations on developers migrate from the word “require” to the word “request.”
—Translated out of the planning dialect: under the current plan, a downtown road operating at Level of Service E or F is a problem the city must confront. Under the new plan, that same road, filled to 100 percent of capacity, meets the standard.
—What 1.0 Feels Like Behind the Wheel
—Kashden’s public comment, addressed to city planning staff, is less a protest than an engineering brief. He built his case on the Federal Highway Administration’s own literature, which describes a road at 1.0 V/C as a route with no spare capacity whatsoever.
—What does that mean on an ordinary Tuesday? Kashden walks through it: stop-and-go traffic at the busiest times rather than smooth progression. Longer waits at signals, especially for side streets and left turns. Left-turn queues spilling out of their turn bays. Gaps in traffic so scarce that pulling out of a driveway or a shopping center becomes an exercise in faith. A trip that normally takes five minutes through a corridor that “may sometimes take five and sometimes take ten or more, depending on small day-to-day variations.”
“The key point,” Kashden wrote, is that “1.0 V/C is a model’s threshold of capacity, not a comfortable operating condition.”
—He went further, citing federal research finding that traffic flow becomes unstable well before a road technically reaches capacity, in the 0.85 to 1.00 range, and pointing to safety studies showing that crashes increase on all road types as traffic approaches capacity. That is the same safety argument Ahearn-Koch echoed in her reply: anxious drivers at a standstill do not drive better. They drive worse.
‘More of an Art’ Than a Formula
—The most quotable moment in Kashden’s letter may be the one he attributes to the city’s own hired expert.
—At the Sept. 1 workshop, Kashden asked the consultant a straightforward question: how were the maximum V/C values determined? The answer, as Kashden recounts it, was that converting the old level-of-service standards into the new ratios is “more of a ‘art’ rather than a mathematical formula.”
—That admission matters. The entire rewrite is being sold as a modernization, a shift to a more precise, data-driven way of measuring roads. If the most consequential numbers in the document, the ceilings that decide how much congestion the city will legally tolerate, were set by feel rather than formula, then the ceilings are policy choices, not engineering findings. And policy choices can be changed.
—Kashden proposes exactly that, with two specific fixes. First, drop the downtown maximum from 1.0, which he calls “unhealthy and potentially dangerous,” to 0.95 or even 0.9. Second, add a duration component, because the draft says nothing about how long a road may sit at its maximum. “A momentary surge is significantly different than a multi-hour effect,” he wrote. As the text stands now, “a road that is operating at beyond maximum v/c for 24 hours would be judged equally to a school intersection when school is letting out.”
—Why the City Wants This
—To be fair to the planners, the rewrite is not a conspiracy hatched in the dark. It is the formal codification of a philosophy the city has been advertising for years, most visibly in Sarasota in Motion, the citywide transportation master plan accepted in 2020. The theory runs like this: Sarasota cannot pave its way out of congestion. Widening roads to chase an A or B grade bulldozes the walkable, human-scale downtown the city says it wants. Better to accept that urban streets will be full, invest in sidewalks, bike lanes, transit and complete streets, and coax residents out of their cars.
—Growth-management attorney Dan Lobeck, whose organization Control Growth Now has led the opposition, argues the quiet part has been said out loud before. He points to a 2015 Herald-Tribune report quoting the city’s transportation engineer saying it would take “some congestion and some discomfort” before people choose something other than their cars. In Lobeck’s telling, congestion is not a side effect of the new plan. It is the mechanism.
—The counterargument writes itself in the city’s own statistics, which opponents cite constantly: roughly 94 percent of trips in Sarasota are still made by automobile. A plan that stops measuring, and stops limiting, car congestion in a city where nearly everyone drives is, in the critics’ view, not a mobility strategy. It is surrender with a bike lane.
—Who Wins: Follow the Approvals
—So is this developer-friendly? Read the mechanics and draw your own conclusion.
—Under the old system, traffic was a test a project could fail. Concurrency gave the city, and by extension its residents, a lever: prove the roads can handle your tower, your hotel, your apartment block, or mitigate the impact. Under the new system, that lever is largely gone. If 100 percent congestion downtown is by definition acceptable, then no downtown project can meaningfully flunk a traffic review, because there is almost no level of traffic left to call unacceptable. Where the old text required developer mitigation, the new text, opponents note, frequently requests it.
—The rewrite does not speed up traffic. It speeds up approvals. It is the paperwork of a city bracing for, and accommodating, the wave of development already visible on every downtown block, from the condo towers of the Quay to the projects queued up along the trail. For a builder, a comprehensive plan that has made peace with gridlock is one less lawsuit, one less denial, one less expensive traffic study standing between a site plan and a crane.
—For the resident idling on Fruitville at 5:15, the bargain reads differently: the city gets the growth, the developer gets the entitlement, and the driver gets the queue.
—The Paradox on the Pavement
—Here is the part that has residents scratching their heads. The same city government advancing a plan that accepts full congestion has spent years engineering its streets to move cars more slowly on purpose. Lower limits on Ringling. Speed tables at St. Armands. A slower causeway. Road diets, roundabouts and bike lanes under the complete streets banner.
—Each of those projects, defensible on its own terms, removes a little capacity or a little speed from the network. The new plan then declares that a network running at the very edge of its shrunken capacity meets the standard. Slow the roads down, then define full as fine. Whatever one calls that strategy, it is at least internally consistent: every piece of it makes driving less attractive. The open question, the one Kashden and Ahearn-Koch are now pressing in writing, is whether the people stuck in the resulting traffic ever consented to being the experiment.
—The Longboat Key Stakes
—Barrier island readers have their own reasons to watch this document. The transmitted draft deletes the city’s decades-old written commitment to support planning for a second bridge connecting Longboat Key to the mainland to relieve the Ringling Causeway, along with an interlocal traffic-review policy tying the two governments together, deletions that blindsided Longboat officials in August and drew a pointed rebuke from Commissioner BJ Bishop at the transmittal hearing.
For an island with one road on and one road off through the city, a mainland plan that formally tolerates saturation on the approaches to that road is not an abstraction. Every tenth of a point between 0.85 and 1.0 is measured, on this end, in minutes added to the Gulfstream backup.
—What Happens Next
—The draft chapter was transmitted to the Florida Department of Commerce in early August for an expedited 30-day state review, a clock that has now effectively run out, and opponents have formally asked the state to force the slower, full review process instead. Barring state intervention, the chapter returns to the City Commission for adoption hearings expected in late fall. A joint meeting between the Sarasota and Longboat Key commissions is on the calendar for October, where the deleted island policies, and now the V/C ceilings, are certain to come up.
—Between now and then, the numbers fight will be waged in exactly the arena Kashden chose: public comments, workshop questions and emails that end up on the city manager’s desk. He has given the commission a specific, modest ask, shave the downtown ceiling to 0.95 or 0.9 and say how long “full” is allowed to last. Ahearn-Koch has put in writing that she agrees.
—The other three votes belong to commissioners who sent the plan to Tallahassee in the first place. Whether an engineering memo and one word, “art,” can move any of them may determine what driving in Sarasota feels like for the next twenty years.
