Planes, Trains And Automobiles All May Be Key Pieces In Area’s Mobility Puzzle
Growth. It’s the lifeblood and sometimes poison pill that Floridians have to swallow in order to keep the state’s development-driven economy moving. And that certainly is true here in Palm Beach County.
In the western communities, especially those situated between Southern Blvd. and the Beeline Highway, that means dealing with intense traffic congestion on the only three major roads that connect west to east — Northlake, Okeechobee and Southern boulevards.
“You can’t have just three ways in an out of the western communities,” Indian Trail Improvement Executive Director Burgess Hanson said this week. “The development is here, and it exceeds the capacity of most of the roads. Something’s got to give.”
At the same time, State Road 7, Royal Palm Beach Blvd. and Seminole Pratt Whitney Road are the only major arteries west of Florida’s Turnpike moving traffic north and south. In the case of the fast-growing City of Westlake, its only entry and egress is via Seminole Pratt.
Additional east-to-west road access is “imperative,” Westlake Mayor JohnPaul O’Connor said this week. “Not just for Westlake, but for whole region… Transportation is one of the biggest issues, if not the biggest issue facing the county.”
On Tuesday, Dec. 17, Palm Beach County Commissioner Sara Baxter will be hosting a town hall meeting, ostensibly focused on the possible extension of Okeechobee Blvd. from just west of Seminole Pratt to near 20-Mile Bend. The extension would give residents of Arden and other developments along Southern a second way in and out of their communities.
An Okeechobee extension is not currently part of the county’s five-year plan.
Baxter, whose District 6 includes most of the western communities, said this week she expects a number of road-related issues will be touched on at the 6:30 p.m. session at the Royal Palm Beach Cultural Center.
A survey conducted by her office found that 68 percent of respondents favored the extension, Baxter said. However, many residents of the area fear that extending Okeechobee all the way to 20-Mile Bend to connect with Southern Blvd. (State Road 80) would create massive traffic increases on what is now a two-lane road, she said.
“I feel for the residents who don’t want a road in their backyard,” ITID President Elizabeth Accomando said of the proposed Okeechobee extension. “But the people living in Arden were promised that road.”
At a meeting Tuesday, Dec. 3, the Loxahatchee Groves Town Council reiterated its longstanding objection to the extension and plans to send a letter to the county on the subject.
The problem of road congestion and the need for better access was tragically highlighted Nov. 21 when three Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office motorcycle deputies were struck and killed while parked on the shoulder of Southern Blvd. between Seminole Pratt and the entrance to Arden.
The resulting emergency response and investigation effectively cut off those communities from businesses, schools, doctors’ offices, hospitals and government services east of the crash site for hours. More concerning, Arden residents said, was that it also could have slowed or precluded response from emergency services.
“People being trapped in their neighborhoods is a significant thing,” Baxter said.
Peak traffic volumes between 2018 and 2023 showed an increase of 12,861 (38,408 versus 51,269) trips on Southern between Binks Forest Drive/B Road and Seminole Pratt, according to a six-year traffic study on the county’s Transportation Planning Agency web site.
On Seminole Pratt between Okeechobee and Southern, volume increased by 12,631 trips (16,737 versus 29,368).
Along Northlake, volume increased by 1,944 (11,902 versus 13,868) trips between 140th Avenue North and Seminole Pratt, and by 3,317 (19,781 versus 23,098) between 140th and Coconut Blvd.
The study concluded in early 2023, when the 4,700-acre, 4,000-home Avenir development was in its initial stages on the north side of Northlake across from the 110 square miles of ITID and The Acreage, a semi-rural community of some 50,000 residents on 17,000 lots.
The fact that Avenir is lining up one its entrances/exits with 140th Avenue North — a residential ITID road — is among the concerns expressed by ITID Supervisor Betty Argue in a Nov. 17 letter to county commissioners.
“This design risks funneling thousands of vehicles daily into our community,” Argue wrote.
Already, she continued, gridlock on Northlake “has caused fatalities, serious injuries and reckless cut-through driving on ITID residential roads. This not only endangers our families but also deteriorates the quality of life in our community.”
There may be a lot more to come on property that remains technically in ITID territory although it has already been annexed into the City of Palm Beach Gardens, which controls most of the zoning and development authority in the area.
Plans for the Vintage Oaks development on 18 acres approximately a mile east of Coconut Blvd. would add 111 townhomes; the proposed Coconut Palm Plaza project at the southeast corner of Coconut and Northlake would be a sprawling, four-story apartment/condo complex with 176 units and parking for 269 vehicles; and another large townhome complex is eying the southeast corner of Northlake and 140th, ITID Engineer Jay Foy told the district’s board at their November meeting.
Coconut Palm Plaza and the unnamed project at Northlake and 140th, plus their commercial retail components, would cover the parcels between Northlake and Hamlin Blvd. to the south. While neither project anticipates a connection to Hamlin, it would leave residents on that street with a view of large, multi-unit developments rather than the trees, scrubs and wildlife they’re used to seeing. The undeveloped property also has acted as a buffer against noisy Northlake traffic.
The unnamed development does anticipate an entrance/exit onto 140th.
Officials in the Palm Beach Gardens City Manager’s Office could not be reached for comment.
“This is absurd,” ITID Supervisor Keith Jordano said. “I feel sorry for the people who live on Hamlin.”
Accomando said that concerns about large-scale apartment/townhome developments on Northlake are “extremely premature,” but acknowledged that development pressure around ITID’s boundaries are only going to increase, as is traffic.
One major proposal is for Westlake’s primary developer, Minto Communities USA, to construct the two miles of roadway needed to connect 60th Street North from 140th Avenue North to Seminole Pratt, two miles west. The connection would give Westlake residents the much-needed east-west thoroughfare they were promised all the way to State Road 7 and create some traffic relief on Northlake and Seminole Pratt.
Argue, who will start her third term on the ITID board next week, is dubious. In her November letter she predicted that traffic would worsen significantly once 60th Street is connected to 140th.
“No one wants to sit in traffic, but no one wants to open up the roads,” Accomando said. “That’s the challenge.”
Westlake City Manager Kenneth Cassel said representatives from the Palm Beach County City Management Association and the county finally seem to be working together to seek long-term solutions to mobility issues after decades of county planners running roughshod over municipal interests.
Cassel is one of 15 municipal managers on a committee creating a document that will offer input to the county commissioners as they craft a proposal for a 2026 transportation surtax referendum.
“If we work together, it will help everybody,” Cassel said. “We need to think more countywide regarding regional transportation issues.”
And Cassel said that alternative methods of moving people from east to west and vice versa in the county’s 1,970 square miles of land should be considered, from busways to light rail to even airborne.
Indeed, UrbanLink Air Mobility of South Florida is partnering with Ferrovial Vertiports to develop sites for the takeoff, landing and charging of electric aerial vehicles, according to IOT World Today, which covers the industry.
IOT’s June report also noted that UrbanLink has agreed to purchase 20 electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles for use as air taxis in South Florida beginning in 2026.
Westlake’s O’Connor has been pushing for the addition of a “vertiport” charging station as part of the 50-acre regional park now under construction on the west side of Seminole Pratt near Sycamore Drive.
“Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact,” Cassel said.
A more down-to-earth solution to many of the area’s traffic woes would be for the Florida Department of Transportation to finally build the long-planned, much-awaited two miles of State Road 7 from 60th Street North in The Acreage to Northlake Blvd., said ITID Supervisor-Elect Richard Vassalotti II, who is scheduled to be sworn in on Wednesday, Dec. 18.
The project, which was slated to cost approximately $42 million in 2015 and was at one point FDOT’s top priority, has been held up for many years by City of West Palm Beach lawsuits alleging, among other things, that runoff from the road could endanger the city’s drinking water.
Vassalotti, a retired Palm Beach County Fire-Rescue captain who mostly served in The Acreage, said he blames many of the serious-injury accidents and fatalities he saw on the traffic congestion caused by the failure to complete SR 7.
Everyone is in a hurry to get to Northlake, he said, “and many of them are driving way too fast and blowing through stop signs.”
Vassalotti made the creation of more four-way stops in The Acreage a plank on his recent run for the ITID board, but he said this week, “There’s no stopping this traffic congestion. But we need to find ways to make it safer.”
Westlake Councilman Gary Werner, a semi-retired city planner, was more blunt, saying the nearly unsayable in Florida. “We need the road capacity to handle the traffic, or we need restrictions on growth,” he said.
However, in 2011, the Florida Legislature and then-Gov. Rick Scott, changed the state development laws stripping local governments of much of the power they had to reject a project based solely on traffic impacts.
Baxter, an Acreage resident, said she is doing all she can to add needed pavement and restrict growth in a reasonable way. She supports the extension of 60th Street from Seminole Pratt to 140th Avenue North, but only if 60th can be paved all the way to SR 7 and widened to four or five lanes. She also pointed to efforts to curtail the size of developments without unfairly taking away the landowner’s right to build on his or her property.
An example of her strategy, she said, was a development planned for Southern near Arden. “I was able to get that reduced from 900 units to 490,” Baxter said. “That’s a big difference.”
Whatever the answers are, “there’s never going to be a quick fix,” Argue said recently. “But there are things we can do, and we’re doing them.”
Argue pointed to the successful lawsuit that so far has blocked Minto from connecting Westlake streets to ITID roads. Minto has appealed the circuit court decision. Argue said the district must continue to push back on what many see as an attempt to destroy The Acreage’s semi-rural lifestyle.
“I don’t doubt that there are people who would be happy to bulldoze every bit of the district and commercialize and industrialize the whole area,” Vassalotti said.
“We don’t have to lay down for the county, but we need to work with the county,” Accomando added. “We’re in a rural tier, and we don’t want to lose that identity. We have a little jewel here, and the issue is, how do we protect it?”
