This is not a joke. The Citizens Independent Transportation Trust is working (with the blessing of County Commissioner Moss) toward approving an $11 million road widening in an area of south Miami-Dade County that will only serve a few development interests. This will be yet another move that degrades our agricultural lands, leads to more suburban sprawl, and more depressed property values. One need only look at these two photos to note that widening these roads has nothing to do with ‘alleviating traffic’. Not now, not twenty years from now. The sprawl machine is not dead; its trying hard to get back to work, and we helping to pay for its recovery!
At a time when our County government should reflect on the amount of environmental and economic damage it has legislated over the last decade, decisions like this only serve to remind us that the same incompetent and corrupt people are still in office. To say nothing of the fact that these are PTP dollars that were meant for transit NOT projects that aim to keep the same old road-building/ developer/sprawl planning+engineering firms afloat. Shame on you CITT for not being stewards of our transit dollars.
9 Responses to Why Are Our Leaders Wasting Money on Widening Roads Surrounded By Agricultural Land?
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The development interests are alive and well in Northwest Miami. I saw a brand spanking new 4 lane road at NW 138th St and NW 97th Ave (2 lanes on each side) that literally had street lights+a big median and practically no houses or businesses on it. The new road ended at a dirt road where it traveled to some random farms..I dubbed it the road to no where
This is how they start. They’re probably dying to put more tacky, poorly built, cookie cutter home development out in BFE, that will then bring more development, more sprawl, more traffic, more school, overcrowding. It’s a vicious cycle.
Hey CITT! We have acres upon acres of vacant land in our urban neighborhoods ripe for infill developments, let’s use that and stop paving over the little bit of green we have left. Thanks!
Please let me know where are the above pictures, you seemed to leave out any geographic details.
They seem to be SW 157th Ave. outside the UDB, judging from their titles. I wonder that they were taken in 2006 though…
Google earth the location and it remains as seen in the photos.
uhhh…. traffic data? two photos does not make a proper data set of road usage. I could shoot a million photos of how main hwy in the grove is empty during the weekend, but it is meaningless without the time-history traffic history
I live in the area, at SW 153 ave and 179 Terr. And my neighbors and I support it. I use it everyday to get to my job which is near the Zoo. And since they built the connection of SW 157 Avenue to Kendall Drive, my wife saves 1 hour in her commute. The road has no lights or signals so there are back ups at the stops and when there are accidents traffic is stnading still. We have seen the use of this road growing everyday.Lets do the project before it becomes undrivable.
When I read this and the other articles about this road I was upset. So I went to the CITT website to see why this was being done. And I see that in the plan to the voters SW 157 was to be built to 4 lanes from SW 184 St to SW 112 St. From the previous response I see the County has extended the road even further than this. So have come to think that SW 157 Road is part of a larger plan which should be finished has planned to voters.
Gayle, the ‘plan to the voters’ did not have this project in it. This was added to the PTP by the area commissioner and is not part of a voter approved plan. Converting rural roadways into suburban arterials exacerabates suburban sprawl and is part of the reason our economy is in the dumps. These 11 million dollars could have helped fund a transit line for thousands of people, rather than the few hundred who might use it now.