Faster cars, more people on Rickenbacker revive call to redesign road. ‘It’s wild out there.’
For Lee Marks and veteran bicyclists like him, the Rickenbacker Causeway used to be like a heavenly ride floating across Biscayne Bay to Key Biscayne. Now, it’s harrowing.
“If I’m riding alone, I feel absolutely terrified,” said Marks, who usually joins a group at dawn seven mornings a week. “Drivers are speeding at will, putting the pedal to the metal and going 60, 70, 80 mph, rocketing right past the cyclists, triathletes, runners and walkers on the shoulder of the road.”
A car swerving into the bike lane recently grazed his handlebars. He’s observed accidents and close calls. “It’s only a matter of time before a car careens into a pack of cyclists or runners and wipes them out.”
The Rickenbacker ranks among the busiest roadways in South Florida, with some 10 million vehicles per year traveling on it. But its picturesque views also make it one of Miami’s most popular recreation routes and in the most recent months of the coronavirus pandemic, the number of bikers, joggers and walkers has surged. That many exercisers so close to speeding vehicles has become an increasingly treacherous mix — reviving calls to lower speed limits or even redesign the iconic road.
Police who patrol the six-mile stretch from the tollbooth through the ascent and descent of the William Powell Bridge, across Bear Cut and along Crandon Boulevard to the island village of Key Biscayne acknowledge that the causeway has become more like a speedway.
“It’s wild out there,” said Charles Press, police chief and interim city manager of Key Biscayne. “It’s a wide open road that induces speed and a mindset of lawlessness.”
City of Miami and Miami-Dade County police share jurisdiction of the Rickenbacker and while neither department said they could provide long-term trends on speeding or accidents, the county alone has written thousands of annual citations in recent years. Yet the risk continues to rise on the Rickenbacker.
“Between the cyclists getting killed, pedestrians getting injured, road rage incidents and DUIs, it’s a very dangerous situation that has worsened,” said Lt. Alex Valdes, commander of the city’s traffic enforcement unit. “The mentality of too many drivers on the causeway is to floor it and go as fast as possible.”
Ironically, traffic police suspect a drop in car traffic during the pandemic may be one contributing factor, with emptier or more open lands tempting drivers’ inner Dale Earnhardt. “We see a correlation between the reduction of traffic and the increase in severe speeding and speeding complaints,” Valdes said.
Converting the tollbooth at the causeway entrance into an automated Sunpass drive-through also sped up traffic. “With the toll takers, everybody had to stop and pay and it created a slowdown effect,” Press said. “Now it is chaotic and the traffic pours through onto a straightaway with no interruption until you get to the MAST Academy stoplight.”
Booming bike traffic
Howard Srebnick, a Miami attorney who has been riding with Marks in a group of 12 every morning for 15 years, estimates that the number of cyclists on the Rickenbacker has tripled in the past year.
“You’ve got hundreds and hundreds of cyclists out there every morning and thousands on the weekends with the same narrow bike lane and nobody slowing down to accommodate them,” Srebnick said. “In fact, they’ve painted a second white line on the side of the bike lane, narrowing it by another foot.
“The Rickenbacker has become a recreation destination and not just for cyclists. People come from Aventura and Kendall to the most beautiful recreation area in the county, with water views on both sides. It’s still the best place to ride because there are not many places you can go for a steady, challenging, scenic bike ride.”
Srebnick has witnessed numerous accidents over the years and he’s also been on the scene for all five fatalities that have occurred along the road to Key Biscayne since 2006. All took place in the early morning, when many serious cyclists ride to the key but also when some people are driving home after a night of partying and drinking. In the most recent incident, on June 28, 2020, one cyclist was killed and his riding partner was injured when a Miami-Dade police cruiser collided head-on with the pair as they were riding back to the causeway on Arthur Lamb Road on Virginia Key.
: “It’s long past time to recognize that this is a road that goes through a large park, past beaches, tourist spots, schools and into a residential community that leads to a state park,” Srebnick said. “It’s not a highway.”
He advocates lowering the speed limit, which is 45 mph on most of the causeway and 40 mph on Crandon Boulevard, to a uniform speed of 30 to 35 mph.
“That would only add two minutes’ driving time between the tollbooth and the village,” he said. “It would improve everyone’s quality of life.”
A causeway redesign?
The causeway was originally designed to take a circuitous route through Crandon Park with bay vistas, but real estate developers wanted a more direct path and engineers built it to move traffic quickly and efficiently, said Key Biscayne Mayor Mike Davey.
“It needs to be totally redesigned to make it more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly,” Davey said.
“We’ve got 13,000 residents within 1.1 square miles and more visitors and traffic than we’ve ever had. We’ve got high school kids speeding and people driving recklessly to and from the key. Yes, we want to maintain people’s ability to get out here and residents’ ability to get to work and the mainland but we also need to safeguard those who use the road for recreation, which includes a lot of our residents.”
On weekday mornings, Marks encounters young drivers late for school racing to the mainland and a chokepoint at MAST Academy, where there is no school speed zone. Some parents who don’t want to wait in the dropoff line pull pell-mell into and out of the bike lane to drop off their kids.
“These are parents who feel they can ignore the rules and they are setting a careless example for the next generation of drivers,” Marks said.
While cyclists are struck and killed in other areas of the county — Miami-Dade consistently ranks among the five worst metro areas in the nation in bike-fatality rates — the Key Biscayne corridor is the biggest draw in the region for cyclists and triathletes. Many of them have urged a redesign for years.
The Z Plan created by Miami architect Bernard Zyscovich, would narrow the Rickenbacker travel lanes and add traffic calming measures such as median trees and devote extra space in each direction to a separated bikeway. The plan, drawn up years ago but never acted on, also envisions a partly elevated cycle-track that would connect the mainland to the causeway and a new 20-acre park on Virginia Key by shifting the roadway north.
“The Z Plan would be majestic and it would change the way people drive,” Press said. “I’ve driven the Rickenbacker for 16 years as a Key Biscayne cop and I drove the MacArthur Causeway for 30 years as a Miami Beach cop and neither was designed to handle the volume of vehicles we see today. The difference on the Rickenbacker is the amount of pedestrian and cycling traffic.
“We need to create an environment for all users. The cyclists and the pelotons are not going away, the exercise enthusiasts are not going away, the cars not going away.”
Thousands of tickets
In lieu of the Z Plan, which is still in the conceptual stages, or other funding for design changes, police say a more immediate solution is beefed up enforcement. While Key Biscayne has reduced its patrols along the Rickenbacker and Crandon Boulevard due to higher staffing demands within the village, the Miami and Miami-Dade police departments intend to operate more traffic details in response to complaints.
The county set up recent checkpoints on five dates in December and January, resulting in two arrests, 67 moving violations, 64 written warnings, one impounded vehicle and one weapon seizure, said Miami-Dade Det. Alvaro Zabaleta.
“There’s a perception that we don’t enforce speed limits or write tickets, but we are out there trying to deter speeders,” said Zabaleta, citing a total of 3,291 citations and warnings on the Rickenbacker in 2019. “A lot of these traffic initiatives do not produce a lot of citations because of social media apps that work against us by warning drivers about police presence. They know we are there, we lose the element of surprise, they slow down. But we are determined to work these details whenever our personnel needs allow it.”
Valdes, the Miami traffic enforcement commander, said more traffic lights between the causeway entrance and MAST would force drivers to slow down. “That’s the longest stretch in the city without a traffic device,” he said.
Meanwhile, Valdes said the city plans to add up to four officers to its current motorcycle traffic enforcement unit of 24 officers.
The department is also devoting a $232,500 grant from the Florida Department of Transportation to a “Speeding and Aggressive Driving Saturation Patrol Project” for the purchase of additional radar guns and allocation of additional training and overtime hours, Valdes said.
“I can assure the public that we hear you and the Rickenbacker will be one of our areas of focus,” he said. “The city recognizes the problem and is really trying to crack down, get more radar details out there.”
Bicyclist Marks, a Miami attorney, said urgent action is needed to make the Rickenbacker less hazardous.
“Let’s stop waiting for another tragedy,” he said. “Miami used to be a baby city but now we need to be more civilized about our shared public spaces. We must make this the signature recreational route of our city rather than a scary death trap that’s designed for speeding cars instead of people.”
This story was originally published February 25, 2021 at 7:00 AM.
