GARDENS SEEKS FIX FOR DWYER TRAFFIC
Gardens officials, police taking steps to try to ease the gridlock.
PALM BEACH GARDENS — Residents are fed up with the traffic mess that flourishes every morning in front of Dwyer High.
They say it’s ripe for a crash — a scenario that could also endanger students who cluster nearby waiting for buses.
The high school sits on the west side of Military Trail, south of Donald Ross Road. Traffic in the northbound turn lane into the parking lot backs up about 7 to 7:40 a.m. at the start of the school day.
That creates gridlock at the intersection with Grandiflora Road and the entrance to the 963home Evergrene community to the south, Palm Beach Gardens Engineer Todd Engle said.
The stacking at Dwyer creates blind spots where drivers are traveling the posted 45 mph, he said. Bus stops near Grandiflora and Military make traffic control more complicated.
The city’s solution is to ban left turns from Grandiflora or the Evergrene entrance at Heritage Drive onto Military Trail from 7 to 7:40 a.m. on school days. Engle said the city will also stripe off part of a turn lane on the south side of Grandiflora where parents can pull off when they drop off and pick up their children from the bus stop so they don’t interfere with through-traffic.
Robyn Hankins, president of the Evergrene Master Homeowners Association, said traffic backs up from Donald Ross Road to Hood Road during the morning rush.
“There’s a lot of people who are trying to get a lot of different directions and four or five bus stops all in the same area,” Hankins said. “It’s very heavy traffic, and there are a lot of kids trying to get to school at the same time people are trying to get to work.”
Hankins estimated traffic has doubled in the past year. Dwyer has popular choice programs, she said, and some of the bus stops serve students in choice programs at Bak Middle School of the Arts and Alexander W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts. That means the students might not
live within walking distance of the stop, and their parents often drive them to make sure they get on the bus safely and on time.
Those cars are contributing to the congestion, Engle said. The striped drop-off area will have room for six or seven cars, he said.
Pete DiDonato, the school district’s transportation director, said moving the bus stops won’t help. There’s no better place to move the stops, he said. That would just give students who live in Evergrene farther to walk and draw complaints from a different community.
“Here’s the problem: Even if I take my buses out of the equation, you can’t get in and out of there. The cars alone will stop the traffic,” DiDonato said.
Traffic has been congested near Dwyer for years, but it seems to
be increasing as more drive to school.
School bus ridership is up, too, he said. People are moving into the new Alton housing development to the west.
GPS shows it takes bus drivers two or three turns to get through traffic lights, where it might have taken only one turn in the past, he said.
“We’re going through some growing pains in Palm Beach County,” he said.
Evergrene resident Kim Giuliani said the line of traffic on Military Trail is “just ridiculous” in the mornings. Traffic flies down Military Trail, and drivers cut across lanes at the last minute to get to the Dwyer entrance.
Her daughter’s bus stop for Bak is at the corner of Grandiflora and Military, where there’s no safe place to pull over to drop kids off. Palm Beach Gardens police started ticketing parents who were waiting for the bus to pick up their kids, she said.
Police also started issuing tickets only after they spoke with parents who blocked the turn lane and gave warnings, city spokeswoman Candice Temple said. Parents have been cooperating since then, she said.
Employees of the Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center and the doctors’ offices on Burns Road wrote a letter to Mayor Maria Marino and Police Chief Stephen Stepp this past month thanking them for police enforcement.
They had some “near misses” on their morning commutes because of parents blocking traffic while their children waited for the bus, they wrote.
The city plans to stripe off part of Grandiflora in early November, Engle said.
Police will monitor the area and issue warnings before they give any tick- ets related to the changes, he said.
It’s not safe for students to walk or bike across Mil- itary Trail to get to Dwyer, either, Giuliani said.
Her daughter in eighth grade at Watson B. Duncan Middle School is zoned to go there next year.
“If she does end up at Dwyer, my concern for her is how is she going to get to school safely? I would not be comfortable with her walk- ing to school with the way traffic is,” Giuliani said.
The county controls Mili- tary Trail and doesn’t typically allow school zones for high schools, Engle said.
Palm Beach Gardens offi- cials also asked Palm Beach County about extending the left-turn arrow into Dwyer to move more traffic. County officials said they’d consider it, but they’re concerned abouttheother traffic coming south on Military, Engle said.
The city created a school zone on Grandiflora, a road it controls, for The Benjamin School’s upper grades.
The speed limit is 20 mph when the lights are flashing.