A proposed $379 million overhaul and expansion of the Skyway system in downtown Jacksonville faces growing questions from City Council members as they prepare for a likely vote on doubling the local gas tax.
City Council Finance Committee Chairman Matt Carlucci sent the Jacksonville Transportation Authority a list of queries Monday and said that depending on how much public support and council buy-in there is, the amount of money for the Skyway might need to be reduced.
“What I’m telling people is to keep an open mind to it, Carlucci said. That’s what I’m doing, but it’s up to the JTA to sell it. If it turns into some kind of big drama, it may need to be downsized because I don’t want the Skyway taking down all the other gas tax projects.”
A Jacksonville police officer s recent comments in an arrest report perpetuate an emerging concern about e-scooters after he chased a violator around downtown. It should be noted that failure to operate motorized scooters safely and in accordance with Florida statutes has recently become a rampant and very dangerous problem in the urban core since several businesses have started making electric motorized scooters available to the public for rent, Officer J.R. Peppers wrote.
The City Council approved the bill authorizing the “dockless mobility programs for a year, allowing bicycles and scooters with electric batteries “for point-to-point trips” in a designated downtown area.
COMMENTARY | The Skyway, downtown’s screeching monorail imposter, is Jacksonville’s troubled soul taken physical form, as if some higher power, to teach us a lesson, imbued all this city’s neuroses into a single, tangible, unsolvable thing: The Skyway is too expensive to maintain; it’s too expensive to tear down; it’s too expensive to modernize. The mercurial citizenry hates all the options. The path of least resistance is and has always been to simply look the other way. And this, not by coincidence, is the Jacksonville Way.
We took the money from the feds for the Skyway in the 1980s because we were concerned it would just go to some other city if we didn’t, and so why not us? Why not us is because we did exactly what we did with it, which is build it and then nothing. Nothing for years. Nothing for decades. The “newest” segment opened in 2000. And now it’s nowhere, serving no one, hardly able to give rides away free of charge for, in a word, nothing. Its
Letters from readers: Don t waste money on the Ultimate Urban Circulator jacksonville.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from jacksonville.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Letters from readers: Don t waste money on the Ultimate Urban Circulator Florida Times-Union
Don t waste money on the Ultimate Urban Circulator
The largest single project in Mayor Curry and the JTA’s gas tax plan, $379 million in funding has been proposed to develop a network of autonomous vehicles in Downtown Jacksonville. JTA has repeatedly proclaimed that it would be the first city in the United States to implement such a network.
Jacksonville residents and visitors should not be obligated to serve as guinea pigs for experimental technology, so new that the Florida Legislature is only just now beginning to explore regulations for it. At a cost of nearly $38 million per mile, the “Ultimate Urban Circulator” would not be “the most cost-effective approach” as JTA promises on its website, but more expensive than tried & tested light rail systems in cities across the nation.