Manatee County must control traffic and cure jams

Growth has led to untenable traffic jams.

If you are a retirement-aged baby boomer looking to move to southwest Florida to enjoy warm tranquil winter days away from the metropolitan hubbub and bumper-to-bumper traffic up north, you had better think twice about it.

One only has to experience the never-ending, snail-crawling traffic lines along I-75 and U.S. 301 in and around Ellenton, Bradenton and Sarasota at this time of the year to want look elsewhere for the ideal retirement place in Florida.

What had previously been a short 20-minute drive from Ellenton to Bradenton or Sarasota via I-75 or the U.S. 301 bridge now takes over 45 minutes in bumper-to-bumper traffic. This untenable traffic dilemma in which the citizens in this area find themselves has come about insidiously over the last decade as a result of unrestrained and poorly planned development.

This is clearly the result of shortsightedness on the part of the Manatee County commissioners and planners in their failure to properly prepare for the impact of the predictable increase in traffic generated from large new developments. This, of course, is tantamount to negligence on their part and is what is so annoying to the citizens living in Manatee and Sarasota counties.

The county commissioners need to pause and ask themselves how much growth is enough. When unrestrained growth leads to inevitable water shortages, untenable traffic, overcrowding in schools and unrealized happiness and tranquility, that is when the baby boomers are going to look elsewhere for that placid place in paradise to retire.

Jim McKinney

Ellenton

This story was originally published January 2, 2016 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Manatee County must control traffic and cure jams ."