City Council
City of
Dear City Council Members:
The Sanibel Bicycle Club wishes to thank the Sanibel City Council and City Staff for their many accomplishments over the past year in support of our common goal of improving bicycling safety and infrastructure on Sanibel.
The Sanibel Bicycle Club is proud of its strong working partnership with the City. Over the past year, the Club has been very active in the City’s deliberations on a wide range of shared-use path issues, attending and speaking at countless meetings of the City Council, Planning Commission, 5-Year Budget Committee, Parks and Recreation Committee, as well as communicating frequently with City officials. We sincerely appreciate your serious consideration to the Club’s recommendations.
The attached report is our traditional annual report to Council. This 2004 report highlights the many shared-use path system accomplishments by the City over the past year, and the Club’s recommendations for the upcoming year and beyond, for the City’s consideration.
The Club’s 260-plus members offer to assist the community in moving forward on improvements in the shared-use path system, as outlined in the attached report.
As the outgoing President of the Club, I would personally like to express my appreciation for your support and friendship over this past year. Thank you for your long-standing commitment to Sanibel’s treasured path system.
Sincerely,
George Sousa, President
cc: Judie Zimomra, City Manager
Bruce Rogers, Planning Director
Carla Johnston, Planning Commission Chair
Armand Ball, Chair, Parks and Recreation Committee
ANNUAL REPORT TO CITY
COUNCIL
APRIL 2004
The Sanibel Bicycle Club, throughout its ten-year existence, has promoted improved bicycling safety and infrastructure on Sanibel. Over the past decade, the Club has contributed to the stewardship of the paths, investing hundreds of hours each year on activities such as identifying safety problems and suggesting solutions to the City, identifying sections of the path needing repair, cutting back vegetation that interferes with path safety, picking up litter on the paths, as well as providing long-term path improvement ideas. The Club is proud of its strong working partnership with the City, and we are committed to continuing this partnership to further our common goals.
The Sanibel Bicycle Club would like to thank the City for the wonderful 23-mile shared-use path system that exists on Sanibel today. This treasure reflects the visionary foresight of our City’s leaders and its citizens. Residents, renters, and tourists use the paths for various purposes--walking, jogging, dog walking, rollerblading, bird watching, surrey riding, as well as bicycling. The paths play an increasingly important role in residential transportation for work, errands, and meetings.
It is obvious to any observer that path usage has exploded in the past several years, and more usage should be anticipated in the future. The resulting congestion is having an increasingly negative impact on the safety of the people using these paths. The City’s December 22nd press release, reporting on 6 Sanibel traffic accidents, 3 of which occurred on shared-use paths (2 bicyclists and 1 pedestrian), and sent 5 people to area hospitals during a 2-week period, was a sober reminder of the importance of safety for shared-use paths users. Safety on the shared-use paths is the Club’s long-standing top priority, and we will continue to work aggressively with the City to address these growing safety concerns.
Shared-Use Path System
Accomplishments in Past Year
The City is to be congratulated on the important improvements in the shared-use path system during the past year. The City Council made important policy decisions this year that will lead to further expansion and improvements in future years.
Accomplishments with Long-Term
Implications:
The Plan recommends the addition of 5 miles of
path, with 15 new paths over the next 15 years, and the Club strongly endorses
the #1 priority path—the Periwinkle Bypass.
The Club looks forward to the City’s completion of the next phase of the
Master Plan—recommended improvements in the current shared-use path system.
Sanibel residents have paid, through their property
taxes, for almost all of the construction/maintenance/improvements and
expansion of our path system, yet the majority of path users are visitors. It is only fair and equitable that this major
segment of users should in some way contribute to the expenses the City incurs
on an annual basis to maintain and improve these paths, as well as to expand
the system to meet the increased demand, as called for in the City’s approved
Shared-Use Master Plan.
The Club is extremely pleased to hear that these
efforts are resulting in changes that allow the City’s beach parking revenues
to be used to maintain, improve, and expand the shared-use path system, to the
extent that it provides a link to the beaches.
We understand that the City is asking the County to provide additional
TDC funds for beach park maintenance costs that were previously funded with the
City’s beach parking revenues, thus, enlarging the overall funding level
available to the City for tourist-related services.
We believe that visitors using the beach parking facilities will be supportive of this use of their beach parking fees, and suggest that the City’s signs at the beach parking lots include an acknowledgement of this use.
Path System Maintenance &
Improvements:
Installation
of New
The Club works closely with the Public Works Department on safety concerns on an ongoing basis, and the Department’s responsiveness to these concerns has been exemplary.
Recommendations for City Consideration
While a great deal has been accomplished over the past year, implementation of the City’s numerous plans for path improvement and expansion need continued attention and resources. In addition, if we are to keep pace with the increasing usage of the island’s popular path system, the schedule for implementing planned improvements/expansions must be accelerated. Without this acceleration, the path system could quickly become stressed beyond its capacity, resulting in an increasingly unsafe path system for its many users. The Sanibel Bicycle Club offers for your consideration the following recommendations to the City for the coming year and beyond:
Speed up the timetable for widening all paths. The City is in the process of implementing a
plan to widen all sections of the path system to a minimum of 8 feet.
Currently, only 55% of Sanibel’s path system is 8 feet or wider. The Club recommends that during the current
widening project, the paths be widened to 10 feet, where physically
feasible. Having wider paths is critical
to improving the safety of the path system.
The safety concerns with respect to the 45% of the path system that is
less than 8 feet wide, are as critical as those concerns associated with areas
in need of repair.
The Club is disappointed that the Casa Ybel path will not be widened this year, due to the higher
than anticipated cost of the project. We
believe that the newly available beach parking revenues provide the City with
an opportunity to speed up its widening plan.
Necessary funds should be provided in the FY 2005 budget and beyond to
widen the remaining 10 miles (or 45%) of the system.
As we stated at
the March 16th Council meeting, we share your concern about the lack
of competitors for path system construction and repair work. The lack of competition is causing the cost
of these annual contracts to rise at a much faster rate, resulting in a
reduction in the work that can be accomplished with the funds available. This
problem is not a Sanibel-specific problem—it is a regional problem, with
The
The Club supports additional crosswalks, as a way to improve safety at high-usage intersections. The Club is concerned about declining respect for crosswalk rules on the island. We believe that additional public education of both drivers and path users may be needed. The Club would be happy to work with the City on ways we can assist in this effort.
The Club also supports installation of additional delineators, and will continue to work with the Public Works Department to identify areas most in need of these safety improvements.
Recommended changes to the Sanibel Plan as part
of this year’s Evaluation and Appraisal Report (EAR). As the City develops the required EAR of the
Sanibel Plan this year, the Club recommends that the Sanibel Plan be amended to
reflect prominently the importance of the Shared-Use Path System to our island
community and to incorporate by reference the recently adopted Shared-Use
Master Plan. The Club recommends the
following additions and corrections to the Sanibel Plan (as communicated to the
Planning Commission on
· First, the section in the Land Development Code entitled “Bicycle Path System” needs to be renamed to reflect the change in name to “Shared-Use Path”, reflecting the reality of how the path system is used. This designation should enhance the City’s ability to qualify for State and Federal transportation grant funds. The Parks and Recreations Committee also recommended this change to the City last year.
· Second, the Shared-Use Path Master Plan should be incorporated into the Sanibel Plan by reference.
·
Third, this section (to be renamed “Shared-Use
Path System”) should be expanded to include a statement of the importance of
the path system to the community. The
preamble to the Planning Commission’s resolution endorsing the Shared-Use
Master Plan ((Res. 03-14) as adopted on
· The path system should also be viewed as an alternative transportation system—not just for recreational use. There are untapped opportunities for using an enhanced/improved path system to address some of the transportation issues on Sanibel. We encourage the City, as they work on the transportation section of the Sanibel Plan, to reflect this view.
The Club looks forward to working with the Planning Commission and the City Council this year to ensure that shared-use path system-related issues are adequately reflected in any revisions to the Sanibel Plan.
Innovative financing approaches to increase overall funding level for path system.
The City has made an excellent start in exploring innovative financing approaches, as evidenced by the beach parking revenues funding plan, which was proposed by City staff and approved by Council on March 16th. The Club encourages the City to maximize the use of these revenues to improve the path system. It is our view that the entire path system should be eligible for the use of these funds, since it is a loop covering the entire island, allowing users at one end of the island to bike or walk to a beach on the other side of the island. The Club strongly recommends that this new funding source be used to increase the overall funding level for the path system, i.e., to supplement, not supplant the funds that the City currently includes in its annual Capital Improvement Plan for the path system.
The Club is also excited about recent financing
developments with respect to the proposed
The Dunes initiative provides a model for what might be possible through innovative public/private partnerships. Other recommended improvements to the existing path system (e.g., specific crosswalks, etc.) and/or additional paths may have similar strong community support that could be translated into financial support. The Club would be happy to assist the City in further exploration of the potential of this approach.
The adoption of a Shared-Use Path Master Plan is a major step forward for the City; however, it is simply a plan. To become a reality, the expansion plan must be funded. The first step is to ensure that the Capital Improvement Plan is designed to ensure implementation of the Shared-Use Master Plan. We recommend that the City provide funds in its annual budgets, as well as pursue grant funds, so that the Master Plan can become a reality within a shorter timeframe. For example, if the City’s annual Capital Improvement Plan allocated $100,000 a year towards implementing the Master Plan, the new path expansions recommended in this Plan could be done in 10 years.
The Club continues to support the City’s efforts, as recommended by last year’s 5-Year Budget Committee, to enhance its grant-writing capabilities that could result in the future acquisition of Federal, State, and other funds that may be available.
Ongoing vegetation removal plan. Overgrowth of vegetation from the right-of-way into the paths often reduces the width of the path available for use, creating unexpected obstructions, and increased safety concerns. The overgrowth after the wet season is particularly hazardous. With the major increase in path usage over the past few years, the Club has become increasingly concerned about the safety problems created by this overgrowth. To address this problem, several ad hoc actions have been taken: (1) Members of the Club periodically trim back overgrown areas along the paths near their homes; (2) The Club’s annual Path Clean-up Day includes an effort to trim back overgrown areas throughout the path system; and (3) Members call the Public Works Department to report on areas of the path where they’ve noticed that vegetation problems are severe, and the Department then sends out a crew to trim that specific spot back.
The Club strongly recommends that the City develop and implement a systematic and comprehensive vegetation removal plan. There are several ways this goal could be accomplished: (1) the City could dedicate staff to remove the vegetation on a regular schedule; (2) the City could contract out for this service; and/or (3) the Council could adopt an ordinance requiring property owners along the path’s right-of-way to trim back the vegetation that is interfering with the paths. We believe that most owners would voluntarily comply with such an ordinance, which could greatly improve the current situation. However, we recognize that a portion of the property along the paths is not privately owned (e.g., conservation land), and would still need to be managed by the City. The bottom line is that the paths need to be routinely cleared of vegetation and overgrowth by some method. This has been a major problem recently, and members of the Club cannot clear much of the major overgrowth.
Having a connected trail system between Sanibel and the County should reduce the car traffic to Sanibel, as more visitors could bike here. Being a part of the County’s planning effort should enhance Sanibel’s chances for receiving grant funds for the island’s path system and the planned expansion that is contained in the City’s adopted Path Master Plan.
The Sanibel Bicycle Club believes
that investments in the shared-use path system should be a high priority for
the City, even under the current fiscal constraints due to the causeway crisis.
The paths are an important part of the “quality of life” attraction for current
and future residents of the island. Path usage by visitors, who consider our
paths one of the major reasons they visit our island, also provides important
economic benefits for our community and the City. The path system is also important to the
promotion of healthy and physically active lifestyles, now a national and
statewide campaign to fight the rise of obesity in
It is critical to all segments of the Sanibel community—residents, owners, visitors, and businesses—that we continue to live up to our reputation as a community that appreciates the value of installing and maintaining safe paths. Our island-long path system through a lush and tropical setting allows users to have a greater appreciation of Sanibel’s natural environment.
The Club greatly appreciates the efforts of the Council and the City staff in furthering our common goals, and we look forward to continuing and strengthening this productive partnership in the future. Thank you for your consideration of our views.
ATTACHMENT
LAND DEVELOPMENT
CODE SECTION
“BICYCLE PATH
SYSTEM” PROVISION
(words in italics are new/revised)
Sanibel’s shared-use
path system is an island treasure that should be protected and enhanced. The Sanibel Shared-Use Master Plan is
incorporated into the Sanibel Plan by reference. The community values the path system for the
following reasons:
Shared-Use Paths should be constructed for bicycles, tricycles, pedestrians and wheelchairs, setback from the edge of the road where possible, meandering in the right-of-way without sharp curves or obstructions to vision.
Major arterial and collector roads should all have shared
use paths connecting residential areas to other residential and commercial and
non-residential sections of the