Parking Musings

• 1.       It’s the traffic not the parking Escambia County.  Let’s be clear.  100% of the beaches are open for use by the public!!!  Pensacola Beach has a residential core, a commercial core, and 60% of its beaches are dedicated conservation recreation for public use only!  No restaurants fighting for parking spots, no employee parking needed, no short term rental overnight parking overflow, but spots intended for day visitors only.  Ft. Pickens (I believe) has 1100 spots which probably includes camping spots as well.  The question is what do you do when you have 22,000 cars X 4 people per car at the beach every beautiful weekend?  The answer is a traffic jam.  Address the traffic before you build a parking lot or two that accommodates only 1000 more people parking on the beach.  The 22,000 that are already on the beach have found a spot. 
• 2.      Consolidate community services into one building and move public works, sheriff station, lifeguard and VIC into one office building at SRIA.  Create more surface parking spots at Casino Beach by moving lifeguard vehicles, VIC, and sheriff’s office to another location.  Put consolidated offices on one level of a multisurface  garage at SRIA location.
• 3.      You could build a lot on the Western end of Casino Beach, but it only adds 500 more parking spots and more traffic in a location that is already congested.  You can make it multiuse but it will remain empty most of the time and is expensive to build.
• 4.      Ariola becomes a no parking zone with designated parking banquettes at public crossovers from dusk to dawn only.  Otherwise short term rentals will be parking there overnight and all day with no availability for day visitors to park and enjoy the beach.
• 5.      Make surface parking lots where there is currently county owned land marked for conservation/recreation and water drainage…NOT!  That is the residential core and parking lots are not permitted uses in low density residential neighborhoods.  Yes folks…it’s a neighborhood. 
• 6.      Put up a parking garage in the vacant land next to The Beach Church.  Same problem as in #5 and yes I heard the county was thinking about it and yes PBA has said “Are you crazy?”
• 7.      The parking lot past Dog Park East has room to expand the surface lot to the road and add plenty of spots to this coveted out of the way piece of beach.  Afterall, you either want to be in the core to enjoy the restaurants, bars and facilities the county offers there, or you want to be off in your “personal piece of beach heaven” far from the action of our business core. 
• 8.      Move public works and revitalize that strip of businesses in front of it; remodeling, moving it up, with parking underneath and behind.  Get rid of the water treatment facility and public works.  Move public works vehicles elsewhere…like on the conservation recreation lands in the low density neighborhood in a nicely developed county facility.  Same goes for the Boardwal; move it up with parking under Boardwalk and beautiful vista up!
• 9.      This takes money….lots of money… and planning…and time so what are you going to do in the meantime?  Fix the traffic like you fix it during Blue Angels.  EVERY PRETTY WEEKEND WE HAVE MORE PEOPLE ON THE BEACH THAN ON BLUE ANGEL WEEKEND.  EVERYONE WANTS TO BE AT THE BEACH!  We need traffic cops.  I don’t care what those traffic engineers doth protest…we need traffic cops!   We need to think outside the box.  Why not try it to see if it works?  They move the people and the cars. 
• 10.   District 4 is lucky to have our new County Commissioner and our elected SRIA board member who listen to their constituencies and are bringing new ideas to the table.  They know how to work with the different agencies to propose NEW WAYS OF DOING THINGS!!!  We need to tell the bureaucrats what they need to do instead of the bureaucrats telling us what they want to do.  There are literally people who never come to the beach telling us, “the traffic will all be ok.  It’s just volume.  We are monitoring the light.”   Try to fix the traffic jam first folks.  Try having deputies mange moving the people and the cars.   I know they have classes to teach this stuff.
• 11.   And last but not least we must start with congestion pricing at the toll booth AND a
  Media Campaign to ride the FREE ECAT busses on the weekend.  Did you know the bus was free on weekends last summer?  No and nobody else did either.  If ECAT would offer and the county PROMOTE  park and rides to the beach from UWF, PSC, and The Bay Center, along with all day trolleys that move people around the beach, county residents just might use mass transit to get out to the beach.   Park and Ride from Gulf Breeze please!   Moving day visitors on and off the beach is a county problem and the leaseholders on the beach shouldn’t be paying for any of this…especially a parking garage at the beach.