Underpass dismays the Villages
Cumberland Drive curves gently through a suburban mile of houses and townhomes tucked between Military Trail and Village Boulevard, just west of Interstate 95.
It’s a two-lane road split by a wide, oak-shaded median, where neighbors walk dogs and jog beside grassy swales, play ball in Perini Park, swim and play tennis at a community center.
The City Commission recently voted to spend more than $1 million to add protected bicycle lanes to Cumberland, along with a repaving project set for November and a roundabout adorned with public art, to hold cars to the speed limit of 30 mph.
So it came as a surprise there’s another project under consideration that would intentionally send traffic coursing through Cumberland by way of a proposed I-95 underpass to Congress Avenue, in order to relieve congestion on 45th Street, Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard and other major arteries. Perhaps even more surprising, considering the consequences of angering thousands of neighborhood voters: West Palm Beach representatives on the Metropolitan Planning Organization backed a proposed study of that option offered by the Florida Department of Transportation.
“The plan is absurd,” said Ron Warnecke, president of the Villages of Palm Beach Lakes Property Owners Association, a collection of 32 separate smaller associations comprised of 4,000 homes.
City officials say West Palm Beach is only taking advantage of the fact that the Florida Department of Transportation offered to spend the money for a study. “People jump to conclusions, they get nervous and feel like it may adversely impact their neighborhood,” Assistant City Administrator Scott Kelly said. “I don’t know that. You have to do that study” to see if that’s true, he said.
“If it has adverse impacts, that’s a different story. But if there’s money available to study it and with no obligation, why wouldn’t people want to study it?” Kelly said.
“This is not even close to becoming a reality and it is just a matter of studying it to see if there’s anything there,” agreed City Commissioner Keith James, who voted for the study as one of West Palm’s representatives to the Metropolitan Planning Organization.
“I would not be in favor of any designs that were incompatible with the neighborhood,” said James, a past resident of that section of the city who on Wednesday announced a run for mayor.
According to an MPO spokeswoman, the issue relates to increased traffic on the interstate, which eventually will be widened. The state is considering options to reduce congestion where I-95 exits onto 45th Street. That could involve widening the offramps or redesigning how they mesh into 45th Street, and adjusting signal timing.
But another option the state put on the table for local consideration would be to take some traffic off 45th by building another road under I-95. That road would be Cumberland, which currently ends at Village Boulevard, which girds the neighborhood and buffers it from I-95.
An underpass would allow east- and westbound cars to take Cumberland from Military Trail to Congress Avenue, instead of using 45th to the north or Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard to the south, to get to areas on the other side of I-95.
The MPO spokeswoman said state traffic engineers determined from a preliminary study that the Cumberland option probably wouldn’t relieve enough traffic from 45th to make it worth doing, but offered to study it in more detail.
Katherine Waldron, who represents the Port of Palm Beach on the MPO board, said she was the only MPO member to vote against it. “It didn’t seem to me like they had a good reason, a good public reason,” said Waldron, who lives near Cumberland.
“Just having it out there as a study, to me, is troublesome,” she said. “It shouldn’t even be looked at. It doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t see how that helps.”
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