Florida transportation officials had been working on the plans to expand the 18-mile stretch of U.S. Highway 1 from the mainland to the Keys for years without drawing much attention from environmentalists. Then, in the mid-1990s, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) applied for a permit to begin work on a project to double the road's lanes from two to four, and "all hell broke loose," according to Charles Pattison, executive director of a nonprofit growth-management group called 1,000 Friends of Florida. Even though the project would clearly have an impact on the environmental quality of the Keys by paving the way for greater vehicle flow, the question of what this impact would be had not been well-examined, particularly outside of the FDOT.

Pattison's organization and three others joined to file suit, and today the project remains stuck in litigation with an uncertain future--a prime example of what happens when traditional transportation planning processes collide with growth management. Too often, the environmental impacts of road building plans aren't adequately addressed until very late in the process. These projects develop an inertia that overpowers people and groups who object on environmental grounds, and when proposals are halted, taxpayers take a hit that might have been avoided by better early planning.

In an attempt to rectify this problem, Florida has embarked on a pilot program called Efficient Transportation Decision Making (ETDM), which aspires to incorporate environmental review into the early stages of transportation planning. The program, which is coordinated by the FDOT, is a first-of-its-kind effort to achieve the "environmental streamlining" of transportation planning called for by Congress when it passed the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century in 1998. The FDOT is working in conjunction with the Federal Highway Administration and other federal, state, and local agencies to create a new venture that will be closely watched nationwide.

"You can build a lot of things and still protect the environment, but you have to identify the safeguards to do it," says Leroy Irwin, who heads the FDOT's environmental management office and coordinates ETDM. "This will help us to identify things early on."

At the moment, Irwin and colleagues are trying to pull together a plan of how the various agencies will do the work. Essentially, the model calls for the creation of an environmental technical advisory team, staffed by representatives from various agencies, to perform "screening events" early in the planning process. The program timetable calls for the first screening events to occur in July 2003.

Representatives of nongovernmental organizations who have studied ETDM are happy with what they've seen so far. "If it really does what it's supposed to do, it will be a great thing, and we'll support it one hundred percent," says Jennifer McMurtray, transportation and wildlife ecology coordinator for the Orlando, Florida, office of the advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife.

She points to a current dispute involving plans for a road through the Wekiva River Protection Area as an example of how ETDM could be useful. "It's really a bad project," she says. "If the ETDM system were already in place, and if it had been used in looking at this road, this is one [project] that would have sent up red flags all over the place. That's going to be the test of the ETDM system: when there are red flags, how is it going to be worked out?"

Transportation planners and environmentalists across the nation will be keeping their eyes on Florida in coming years looking for answers to that question.

Richard Dahl