We live in a wonderful place. The evidence is how many people have moved here from other places and how traffic has increased in the area. It’s one of the biggest complaints here, and when traffic is one of our biggest problems and not crime, or economic deterioration, or education, like you see in the cities where people are fleeing from, it really highlights how lucky we are, and it also means people will be passionate about our community.

One of the frequent arguments I hear is that Florida and Sarasota County should go back to the idea of transportation concurrency. But transportation concurrency is what really created our traffic and planning problems that we are dealing with today. There were legislative attempts to fix some of the problems within concurrency, but these problems were never fully solved in this flawed system.

In 1985, the State of Florida, through the legislature, implemented transportation concurrency – the idea that new development has adequate facilities and services to support it. It led to the requirement that a developer make improvements if there is not enough capacity to handle the development or wait until the government made the improvement. Sounds good right? It did until the concept was applied, and you saw the results.

It triggered a race to develop, making development occur quickly and with less thoughtful planning to it as the last man standing was left holding the bag, or rather, paying the price. Property owners developed fast to use the existing capacity of roads to not be the one who triggered the need to improve it, which meant that they would have to pay. Or, they would have to not develop and wait until the government paid for the improvement and hope that they could use their property someday as the costs of increasing capacity for everyone would be prohibitive.

This uneven distribution of costs between developers, not based upon the capacity they used but the capacity available, incentivized quick and cheap development. At the same time, it discouraged redevelopment in urban areas, as the costs to increase road capacity, many times in an already failing or near failing system, would exceed any reasonable profit in redeveloping.

The result of redevelopment being too costly had a negative effect on sprawl and congestion. First, it would push developers to invest in areas where road capacity was available. This resulted in development in areas like the suburbs and even rural areas causing more cars to be on the roads for longer periods, and it led to more congestion.

Courts later weighed in and made proportionate share the rule if a development triggered a road deficiency. Development that triggered the deficiency would only be responsible for its share of that deficiency. However, it never solved the problem of the developments leading up to the deficiency not contributing for their proportionate share of impact.

Concurrency also drove up housing costs and had a negative impact on affordable housing. Since costs were not distributed evenly across developers by the effect of each development, this led to an unpredictable system where a developer could suddenly have to pay for his development’s impacts and everyone else’s impacts.

Developers would have to automatically bake these costs into their pricing, driving up housing costs and leading to less affordable housing. It would also drive up the housing market overall, even if a developer did not have to end up paying the concurrency-related costs.

When the recession was in its worst years, Florida began converting to a more equitable and sustainable system that made all development pay for its impacts with mobility fees. Development pays for its impacts no matter whether the road has capacity or not. It would be up to the government to use those funds to improve the roads with those accumulated funds.

In 2015, Sarasota County established the mobility fee system to more effectively fund transportation infrastructure improvements created by new development. We operate on this system today but still see the negative effects of thirty years of concurrency with our road system where infrastructure was not funded by all new development within the county.

This new system also allows for fee investments in alternative forms of transportation like transit, sidewalks, and bike lanes/paths. Some of this money has been invested in the Legacy Trail.

Sarasota County is now on a more sustainable path with mobility fees, and while we have to catch up from the deficiencies of concurrency, all growth is now paying for its impacts under this system. Concurrency is not an answer to our congestion problem, but rather the cause of it.

Christine Robinson is the Executive Director of The Argus Foundation.