Complete Streets Analysis in Boynton Beach, Florida

Project Overview

The City of Boynton Beach used Urban SDK to understand mobility trends around the SE 1st Street corridor to provide insights into the value of planned complete streets improvements for the corridor.

SE 1st Street does not currently have any active transportation infrastructure; comprising a two-lane roadway with grass boulevards on either side.

It is proposed to have a 10 foot shared use path on the west side of the road between Boynton Beach Boulevard in the north, and Woolbright Road in the south. There are also intersection traffic calming measures proposed at SE 12th Avenue.

To complement its use, and enhance safe access to/from transit, enhanced traffic calming streetscaping and updated sidewalks are proposed on SE 5th and SE 12th Avenues between Seacrest Boulevard and Federal Highway 1.

This would allow complete streets improvements along SE 1st Street to create a network that would support current safety needs as well as planned transit-oriented development and growth.

Methodology

Urban SDK cleaned and aggregated its own raw data sources for this memo, as well as other publicly available data sources.

This includes the following:

• HERE Technologies provided raw data from connected vehicles.
• Mobile Data, location-based services (LBS) provide metadata including longitude/latitude, time, and an anonymized ID.
• Government Counts annually published traffic counts from Federal and State governments are used to develop Traffic Volume models to derive Average Annual Daily Traffic (AADT)
• FARS is a database of road fatalities maintained by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
• Census Data: age, population, income, and vehicle availability data
• Transit GTFS route and schedule data was obtained from Palm Tran’s public GTFS feed.
• Land Use Data obtained land development rates and planned uses from the City of Boynton Beach’s zoning portal

Findings

85th percentile speeds were compared by period, weekday, and month along SE 1st Street. No segment saw speeds exceeding the posted limit of 25 mph, however there were notable differences across the corridor.

Segment 1 between Boynton Beach Boulevard and SW 2nd Avenue had the slowest speeds. Typically 5-7 mph lower than the other segments.

Segments 3-4 between SE 5th Avenue and Woolbright Road saw the fastest speeds with Segment 2 being ~2 mph slower.

These portions of the corridor are a mix of residential and industrial uses with no sidewalks. The fastest periods were overnight and early mornings. Weekends were generally faster than weekdays, and winter months were faster than summer months

Major roadways show a pattern of increased speeds on weekends, however, in contrast to SE 1st Street which experiences slightly faster speeds during the winter months, the major roadways in the area experience the opposite effect; faster speeds in the summer months. Additionally, major roads experience 85th percentile speeds between 41 - 44 mph which is ~20 mph higher than speeds observed on SE 1st Street.

A comparison of local street speeds within 1 mile of SE 1st Street shows that most are typically 5 mph slower than it, emphasizing that although the corridor is slower than major roadways, it experiences 85th percentile speeds that are ~33% higher than the typical local street within the area.

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