BY MARK SCHUMANN

Now is the time for business owners, residents and others who are supportive of efforts to revitalize the downtown area to stand up and speak out.

A practical and well-considered proposal to finally alter what amounts to two drag strips bisecting downtown Vero will be considered again by the Vero Beach Planning & Zoning Board this Thursday at 1:30 at City Hall.  Advocates of implementing practical traffic-calming measures in the downtown area should make every effort to attend this meeting.

To be sure, those whose only interest is to save 30 seconds or less speeding through downtown are prepared to spend hours sitting through commission and council meetings chanting, “If it isn’t broke don’t fix it.”

Others who are given to criticize and belittle everything “Vero Beach” have and will continue to argue that a superhighway cutting through the downtown area is in no way impeding development and commerce in the area.  They are wrong.

Reflective of those who have a lot of advice to offer but who are really more interested in the welfare of the barrier island, a weekly newspaper recently described downtown Vero Beach as a place of “squat buildings and dirty store fronts.”

Pundits and others who defend the continued existence of the “Twin Pairs” highway cutting through downtown continue to repeat the false claim that “it’s always been that way.”

This claim, of course, is not true.  The “Twin Pairs” project was first conceived by the Florida Department of Transportation as a way of accommodating the huge increase in traffic that resulted when Interstate 95 was extended south to Vero Beach in the early 1970s.

Vero Beach has long since ceased to be the southern terminus of Interstate 95. Yet, the state DOT went ahead and built the “Twin Pairs” project anyway, yet another example of wasteful government spending.  Within two years of its construction, the city was already proposing ways to counter its negative effects on the community.

Today, after numerous studies by the city and others to do something about it, the “Twin Pairs” remain, like two deep cuts scarring what could otherwise be an attractive and vibrant downtown befitting one of Florida’s otherwise most attractive coastal communities.

Studies show that proposed traffic calming measures, including narrowing the “Twin Pairs” to two lanes each, providing for on-street parallel parking and creating separation between the roadway and sidewalks with landscaping, would have profound benefits for the historic downtown area, with little negative consequence to traffic flow.

Traffic calming measures implemented in other communities have demonstrated that the benefits far outweigh the minimal impact of travel times.  In Lake Worth, for example, the one-way section streets running through that city were reduced to two lanes with landscaping and on-street parking.  The results have been positive.

The perennial debate over what to do about the “Twin Pairs” is coming to a head, and the time is now to take seriously the need to make long overdue changes to the seven lanes of virtual interstate now serving as a drag strip through downtown Vero Beach.

If those who care about the city, and specifically about the future of the downtown area, remain silent, an opportunity to take an important step in revitalizing the area will be lost and those with little interest in the most historic section of our community will have won.