Palm Coast has its own peculiar standards for traffic back-ups: any queue of a dozen or more cars at an intersection qualifies. By that standard, the backups at the intersection of Royal Palms Parkway and Town Center Boulevard are nightmares.
They’re about to get worse, and Palm Coast City Council members are concerned. But a three-way stop may be on the way. But city planners say a roundabout is the surest solution.
The council today cleared the way for the first 224 of a planned 333 single-family houses at “Sabal Preserve,” the 85-acre development stretching on the north side of Royal Palms where it joins with Town Center Boulevard, almost to I-95. The development has just two entry and exit points, both very near each other, both on two-lane Royal Palms.
The developer was required to build just one off-site improvement: one left-turn lane into the development for drivers going east, to prevent back-ups at that turn. The right-turn lanes were already built.
The council’s action today was approval of Sabal Palms’s final plat, which maps out the individual lots and opens the way to house construction on two of its three phases. Residents will start moving in in a matter of months, adding to Royal Palms’s crunch.
Even now, Council member Ty Miller said, “you end up with 100 cars there waiting to get out,” to make a left from Royal Palms to Town Center Boulevard, which has no signal. A frustrated driver at one point took a marker to a barrier on the bridge over the canal near the intersection and scribbled, “Put a Light Here.”
“I brought up, and residents have brought up many times, the issue of that intersection and how it’s going to be further amplified,” Council member Charles Gambaro said today. “It’s bad enough as it is. It’s further amplified going forward with these additional homes going.”
Gambaro wanted to know whether the city has a plan for that. It does, but it may be a while before the plan is implemented.
The city is designing traffic-flow improvements for the nearby intersection of Town Center Boulevard and Old Kings Road. That $5 million design entails large-scale improvements. The design alone will take some time, and the implementation will take a few years. So the city is looking at a temporary short-term solution meanwhile.
Part of that short-term solution is a study of traffic counts at the Royal Palms-Town Center Boulevard intersection, Acting City Manager Lauren Johnston said. One of the possibilities is a “three-way stop or something to that degree before we’re able to put something permanent in place to mitigate that concern.” That may create its own issues: right now traffic flowing along Town Center Boulevard in both directions is unimpeded, as is traffic from Town Center Boulevard turning right on Royal Palms.
“One of the concerns that we are afraid of,” Senior Planner Phong Nguyen said, is that a three-way stop “would back up the westbound traffic on Town Center back to Old Kings Road. So we are very careful in measuring this and analyzing this for the temporary improvement condition.”
“Based on my experience, that’s a prime intersection for a roundabout,” Nguyen said. It would “alleviate all approaches,” he said. Royal Palms Parkway has 8,000 daily trips, 6,000 south of the intersection, and 10,000 from Old Kings Road. “We think a roundabout would work very well there.”
Additionally, Johnston said, “traffic flow will help once we’ve commenced construction on the Belle Terre [Parkway] safety improvements,” a $4.5 project, paid for with a state appropriation, that will add turning lanes at seven intersections on Belle Terre Parkway. (See a list of those intersections here.) The Royal Palms Parkway intersection with Belle Terre will have several turning lanes extended, pedestrian crossings will be eliminated, drainage will be improved, and traffic signals will be updated.
It was puzzling, however, how turning-lane improvements 1.5 miles away will improve traffic flow at Royal Palms Parkway and Town Center Boulevard.
“There’s a lot of development going on in this general vicinity, and we just need to not get behind the eight-ball,” Council member Theresa Potieri said. Not far from the intersection, along Point Pleasant Drive, a 78-house development is rapidly adding homes that will be occupied sooner than those at Sabal Preserve. All that traffic will go onto Point Pleasant or Ponce de Leon Drive. Point Pleasant connects Belle Terre Parkway to Royal Palms Parkway. Apartment complexes are rising along Town Center Boulevard.
The lots will have a minimum width of 40 feet. The roads and utilities will be built by the developer, and the roads inside the subdivision will be maintained by the homeowners’ association. Based on the city’s analysis, the new development on Royal Palms will not cause the road to fail–that is, to be over capacity.
