Meet the Island Hopper. You Won’t Meet It Often.

Posted on July 25, 2026     Leave a Comment

Streets for People  |  Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown  |  Chris Hamilton  |  July 25, 2026 | Short-version crossposted at The Keys Citizen

Key West’s FY27 budget proposes scrapping Key West Rides and the Workforce Express for one island-wide hourly loop — the latest in a decade of transit overhauls.

The City held its FY27 budget meeting on Monday, the 20th and it’s like déjà vu all over again as they cite budget constraints in proposing yet another huge change to the public transit system. For the umpteenth time since 2020 Key West Transit will completely overhaul local service in the name of greater efficiency and better service. Each change, examined in a vacuum perhaps made sense in its time and place, but taken together, the 2020’s have been a mess of changes that make existing riders roll their eyes and potential riders say no thank you.

The City will continue to keep the Duval Loop on hiatus. Who didn’t see this coming? And after just three and a half years of operation, the City is proposing to eliminate both the Key West Rides on demand service and the 3-year-old Workforce Express route and replace it with a new Island Hopper that traverses the island, every hour, 12 times a day in both a clockwise and counterclockwise direction.

The County, which eliminated its transit department and the popular Conch Connect on-demand service last summer has a modest proposal on the table to add 4 in-bound and 3 outbound trips a day on the Lower Keys Shuttle. If the County Commission wants to raise taxes. Color me skeptical. 

What’s maddening is both the City and the County at this time last year promised to explore using tourist tax dollars for tourist serving transit along with seeking other local revenue sources. They’ve put nothing significantly new on the table this budget season in terms of revenue, save for the usual feint toward Federal and state transit grants, so we seemed to have wasted a whole year.

Walk with me as we get into the gory details. We’ll explore the pros and cons of the proposed Island Hopper, learn why Key West Rides on-demand is disappearing, figure out if the Duval Loop is or is not coming back, chronicle all the changes or churn over the last decade, learn what the County has or has not been doing, and look into why a whole year has passed with no new money to be found. Yea, that’s a lot. So maybe fetch a cup of strong Cuban coffee, or better yet a cold beer, and then let’s dive in together…

Big Changes Proposed for Local Transit Service

If the new Island Hopper was being offered in addition to the existing services, I’d be intrigued. The Hopper routes are vaguely similar to the North and South lines that were eventually phased out in late 2023, almost a year after Key West Rides was introduced. They also look an awful lot like the North and South Connector routes the City proposed as adding in its updated Transit Plan unveiled in March. 

The Island Hopper is a giant one-hour-and-45-minute loop around the entire island, covering downtown and the Historic Seaport, the beaches, airport, most of the residential enclaves in New Town, the hospital and college, much of the retail on N. Roosevelt and parts of Truman and White Street. So, there’s “coverage”  and that’s good. But does it hold together when it represents the entirety of the local public transit system, replacing both Key West Rides and the Workforce Express? 

The whole “clockwise” and “counter clockwise” thing isn’t intuitively easy to follow. An hour between buses isn’t “frequent.” And we asked if a stop is being served in both directions would mean getting 30 minute service – just different directions and the answer was no – both buses leave together and chase each other around the loop. So, you get hourly service.

The span of service seems to have constricted too. Key West Rides service hours are 6 am to 8 pm. The Island Hopper’s last buses out of downtown northward are about 5:45 and 6:04. Here’s what some folks on Facebook said about this:

Theresa – “6a-6p doesn’t support workforce in a tourist/hospitality driven community. We are not a 9-5 workforce.”

Micaela – “Maybe employers will suddenly start closing early to fit the bus schedule.” 

And the most glaring deficiency is not serving the County side of Stock Island. That’s where most of the residents on Stock Island live and it’s a huge part of our workforce. And on the Stock Island gap:

Valerie — “Why did they skip the West side of stock island where most people live.”

Key West Rides: Killed for Being Too Popular

At the Budget Meeting Commissioner Kaufman asked “What about people who have been relying on Key West Rides? What are their options now, someone who lives in New Town and goes to work in Old Town? How will they now be able to get transportation?”

Transit Director Rogelio Hernandez answered:

“I want to start off by saying we still have Key West Rides. Okay, the Key West Rides are very popular service. What you are not seeing is also the amount of unmet demand. So, it’s so popular that we are unable meet that demand. We’d have to actually add more vehicles and more manpower, its expensive to operate Key West Rides and throughout the year we have noticed that so, what we’re doing as the City Manager mentioned, we’ve looked at the ridership and collected that data and identified a service that will better serve the community and our current riders. So, the Key West Rides will be eliminated. But it will be absorbed by a route that would meet the current rider’s needs.”

In other words a victim of its own success. But contrast this with then Transit Director and now Assistant City Manager Rod Delostrinos explanation in late 2021 for proposing to do away with the then existing North and South fixed-route lines with on-demand:

“This course of action eliminates running empty buses, reduces fuel use, and lowers environmental impacts such as continuous noise pollution and bus emissions along the same small area. One of the features of an on-demand transit system is an increase in system efficiency by maximizing bus capacity. This may lead to reassignment of operators to other routes such as the Lower Keys Shuttle. On-demand transit will better serve the public by reducing wait times, trips times and expanding area coverage.”

In a follow-up explanation after the budget meeting via email, Mr. Hernandez on behalf of Mr. Barroso said: 

“Key West Rides initially took the place of the Northline and Southline fixed-route services, which themselves had replaced the Red, Orange, Blue, and Green fixed-route services during the pandemic’s period of significant uncertainties. At that time, On-Demand service effectively met the needs of existing transit users and residents. However, as we look at the present, the service is unfortunately experiencing a high number of “no-shows,” unmet demand, and issues with reliability. The requirements of our current riders and residents have evolved, and consequently, it is essential that we adapt and continuously enhance our transit service while remaining within our financial capabilities.”

Every reinvention seems to be justified by money, never by “this will get more people on the bus.” 

Wait – Is the Duval Loop Back or Not?

Here’s an exchange at the budget meeting that had us confused:

Commissioner Kaufman: “It was surprising to me to see that what was proposed is the elimination of Key West Rides and no return of the Duval Loop which I thought was the plan of management to bring back to us. Can we get an update and report from transit on what the plan is?” 

City Manager: “Commissioner Kaufman you seem to be inaccurate with your statement, the proposed route (the Island Hopper) is to incorporate the Duval Loop. We provided that to you, and we actually articulated that that was the reason why. But yes, we do have Rogelio to come up and field and possibly correct any errors in the statement.”

Transit Director Hernandez: “The Duval Loop is very popular, when it went away, I believe you saw a lot of feedback on that. The plan is to bring the Duval Loop back once when we can find dedicated local revenue. Until that is done there is no way to bring that route back and maintain it. What we don’t want to do is bring a service that we would then eliminate a year later. So, hopefully that answers the Duval Loop question. We’re always looking at identifying grants, those grants are available; however, we need the local revenue to support it.”

Our confusion lies with the fact that although the Island Hopper does follow part of the Duval Loop route along the Historic Seaport and eastward on Whitehead Street, that’s just a third of the Loop route. And then the Loop, is supposed to be every 15-20 minutes and the Hopper is hourly and would take an hour and 45 minutes to make that Loop around the island. So, no, the Hopper doesn’t really “incorporate” the Loop, any more than the current Lower Keys Shuttle, which follows those same streets, would.

Mr. Hernandez clearly states yes, the Duval Loop was popular, and “there is no way to bring that route back” until they find local matches for grants. Which they haven’t. So, no Loop proposed in this budget. The sad thing is we were here exactly one year ago, precisely because the City said they were losing Federal and state transit grants to cuts from the administrations in Washington, D.C. and Tallahassee. So, the mystery is why they didn’t use this past year to find local sources for everything, including looking at tourist dollars? Mr. Kaufman’s question still hasn’t been answered satisfactorily. 

Churn Baby Churn: Plans Written in Disappearing Ink

Churn. That’s what happens when an agency reinvents its network every few years – riders can’t build their lives around a system that keeps disappearing. Every overhaul resets ridership to zero and asks people to learn the bus all over again. 

Businesses don’t like churn. And it doesn’t work in transit either. Yes, Covid cratered ridership in 2020. But look what recovered and what didn’t. The Loop – the one service they mostly left alone until they killed it – had been coming back. The Lower Keys Shuttle – no changes, same as the Loop, came back. But the core routes, churned over and over, never did. That’s not Covid, that’s the churn.

Chronology of Transit Changes in Key West:

• August 2017 Duval Loop launched. Four routes (Orange, Red, Blue, Green) and LKS exist.
• May 2020 Commission puts $1 fare on Duval Loop.
• May 2020  Orange, Red, Blue, Green routes replaced with North and South Line routes. 
• July 2020 City holds public hearings on the already instituted changes. 
• December 2020 City adopts ambitious Key West Transit Plan – new Old Town, Mid-Town and New Town and Stock Island Loops and Stock Island and New Town Connector routes to downtown via the Airport.
• December 2020 City reinstates free fare on Duval Loop as part of Covid Recovery Plan.
• July 2021 City proposes doing away with North and South Lines and replacing them with on-demand citing “better service, less cost.”
• December 2021 City announces December 20 start to Key West Rides on-demand service.
• February 2022 Key West Rides start date delayed; 10-Year Plan Scrapped.
• March 2022 Duval Loop ridership plummets as frequency is cut, branded buses disappear.
• July 2022 County floats uber-like on-demand service for Stock Island.
• November 2022 City announces November 30 start date for Key West Rides on-demand discontinuation of North and South Line fixed-routes. Note: the North and South Lines kept running alongside Key West Rides well into 2023 — a soft transition.

• May 2023 May 15 start to new Workforce Express route between Stock Island and downtown.
• May 2024 County announces “Conch Connect” on-demand to begin service in July.
• July 2024 City expands Workforce Express and “ruins” it in the process.
• July 2024 County begins new Conch Connect on-demand transit service July 15.
• July 2025 City imposes $1 fare on Duval Loop.
• July 2025 County discontinues Conch Connect despite success, citing budget.
• August 2025 City proposes elimination of Loop and other cuts amidst grant cuts.
• November 2025 Duval Loop to go into hiatus on January 1, 2026.
• March 2026 Updated Transit Plan proposes return of the Duval Loop, increased frequency on LKS and two new fixed routes in addition to existing KW Rides and Workforce Express.

In the ridership chart look at the (KW Rides)/City Routes column as it represents the riders on those Orange, Red, Blue and Green routes, the North and South Line routes, and the current Key West Rides. Add in the Workforce Express. These are the City’s “core” routes for workers and residents. The past four post Covid years show about 71,000, 88,000, 100,000 and 89,000 rides. That’s some up and down churn. Now compare that to the two fiscal years prior to Covid of 172,000 and 186,000 rides and tell me the constant changes are good for business. 

A Year to Find the Money…

Here’s that déjà vu thing, because we are here a year later and the City is once again saying it can’t afford better transit and is making changes as a result. And this seems to happen year after year. But “can’t afford” is a choice about priorities. 

At Monday’s budget meeting in response to Commissioner Kaufman’s concern about the loss of Key West Rides to our “lowest income residents, retirees and workforce” the City Manager responded: “…this department is operating in a $3M deficit and so unless we increase taxes and fund it straight to transportation we had to come up with different revenue ideas and we believe what we are presenting to you is the best possible scenario…You can approve it or not.” We asked the City Manager what the “$3 million deficit” he cited represents. The response, from the transit director, didn’t address it.

What we do know is that the March update to the 10-Year Transit Plan anticipated a cost of $6.275M just to maintain existing service in FY27. The proposed budget is $6.9M. So, this isn’t a cut, it’s essentially flat. But instead of maintaining service, they’re rearranging it. We’d still like to know what the Manager is referring to as that same plan said that on top of that $6.275M for existing service bringing the Duval Loop back would cost $1.5M and new North and South Connectors would each cost $880,000 for a grand total of $9.5M.

At Monday’s meeting Commissioner Lissette Carey asked what it would take to add an additional route to the Hopper, so the service would be every 30 minutes instead of every 60. The Transit Director responded that staff had run two scenarios. One for 60 minutes frequency and one for 45-minute frequency, but only the 60 minutes was presented. The Manager told the Commissioners they’d follow up with that information. In response to our emailed question, Mr. Hernandez told us the 45-minute service would cost $2.8M versus the $2.19M for the Hopper as proposed. That means an additional $600,000 would add some frequency nearly every rider is asking for.

Something to think about. The Transit Fund (page 165), pays the General Fund $713,000 for overhead, PILOT, and franchise fees, and gets nothing back. The frequency upgrade costs less than what transit already hands the General Fund. The money isn’t missing. It’s flowing out. 

While on the subject of money, a year ago, both the City and the County said they’d look into using tourist tax dollars and cruise ship disembarkation fees to help fund tourist serving transit. One year later? Nothing on the table in either the City or County’s proposed budget. 

…The Lever They Never Pulled – Tourist Dollars

What happened? We talked about this last August. In October we shared the City Manager and his finance team signaled a willingness to look at these funds. At the first City Commission meeting in January Commissioner Monica Haskell asked the question “Should the City seek tourist tax funds to support tourist-serving transit like the Duval Loop?” Nearly every commissioner said some version of yes. The City Manager said he was already on it. And TDC President and CEO Kara Franker sent a letter saying she wasn’t opposed “in principle” – while calling for a countywide study before any money moved. We flagged at the time that a study could become a way to run out the clock. Seven months later, here we are. Tick. Tick. Tick. 

The City’s proposed transit budget clearly has none of these funds allocated. But here’s two things we can glean from the County’s recently released budget documents:

• The County’s TDC budget (page 9) rose 30.8% this year — from $86.1M to $112.6M, a $26.5M increase, the single biggest driver of the County’s budget growth. 
• And Administrator Hurley’s budget principles (page 3) say it’s okay to shift tourism-serving costs from general revenue to Tourist Development Taxes “when appropriate.” The County applied that principle this year — to Old Seven Mile Bridge maintenance, TDC-funded for FY27. So, the principle works. It just got applied to a bridge, not a bus.

The City and County had a whole year. Multiple people said they’d be looking into this. The County Administrator’s principle states shifting money can be done and there’s an extra $26 million dollars in TDC funds this year. Tourist-serving transit got none of it. And that’s a choice.

The County’s Half of the Hole

Monroe County dismantled their fledgling transit department last budget cycle and eliminated the popular Conch Connect on demand service on Stock Island and Key West. They also left some pretty good plans for future service, including 30-minute trunk line service along the entirety of the Overseas Highway supplemented by similar Conch Connects in communities throughout the Keys, on the cutting room floor. 

In their first budget session on July 14, County Administrator Christine Hurley presented (pg. 20) a modest proposal to increase the frequency of the Lower Keys Shuttle by 4 inbound and 3 outbound trips a day for 7 days a week at $180,180 or weekdays at $128,700. The catch? The Commission would have to raise the millage rate. Not quite the 60-minute or 30-minute all day headways we were hoping for and that this workhorse of a route deserves– they’re currently between 90 and 120 minutes between buses, but it is a start.

In March we brought you the story that in addition to addressing frequency on the Lower Keys Shuttle that they’d be bringing “a separate workforce bus service for Stock Island residents to Key West to connect with buses to inner Key West locations. This bus would go through the residential areas of Stock Island to pick up riders.” As we didn’t see this in the proposed budget we asked Administrator Hurley about the Stock Island service. She said she couldn’t answer by our deadline and directed staff to respond. We’ll let you know what they say.

With the City seemingly pulling out of the County side of Stock Island by eliminating Key West Rides and the Workforce Express, that leaves a whole lot of workers and residents without any alternative but to drive.

Don’t Build a Bus You’ll Cancel Next Year

“What we don’t want to do is bring a service that we would then eliminate a year later.”

That’s what Transit Director Rogelio Hernandez said in response to a question about why the Duval Loop wasn’t slated to be brought back in FY27 as previously planned. And he’s right. But let’s apply that to Key West Rides. The Workforce Express. The North and South Lines. The colored Orange, Red, Green and Blue lines. The City keeps churning through routes, eliminating one thing and replacing it with another. And that’s exasperating.

Imagine workers living on the County side of Stock Island who’ve seen the Conch Connect and now potentially the Workforce Express and Key West Rides disappearing leaving no public transit to be had. Or the line cook in New Town who works past 6:00 pm and can’t get a Hopper out of downtown. Or the hotel that can’t keep staff because the bus doesn’t support people who do shift work. Think of the human cost in terms of those people who can least afford to live here and are forced to pay to own and operate a car on top of increasing rent. As Rebecca told us on Facebook — “Clearly (the Hopper is) meant for tourists… does not support the local working community.”

Why not this? A single hourly loop doesn’t have to be the whole system. Keep a slimmed-down Key West Rides — or a service like it — to fill the gaps the Hopper can’t: the evening shift-worker heading home at 11, the Stock Island resident the loop doesn’t reach, the neighborhood a long way from the nearest timepoint. Fixed route for the spine, on-demand for the edges. That’s not either/or. That’s how good transit systems actually work.

But even short of that, these are draft budgets. We’ve got till late September to fix them. At the very least the City Commission should have the 45-minute Island Hopper on the table and put tourist dollars toward reviving the Loop. In addition, work with the County to figure out something for their side of Stock Island. That and the County needs to fund more help for the workhorse Lower Keys Shuttle. None of this requires raising taxes; it requires deciding transit matters. So, talk to your commissioners and the candidates.

The City and County, if their budgets are a guide, seem to have wasted most of the last year by not figuring out how to properly fund public transit. Let’s not waste the rest of the summer and fall. Let’s stop the churn and use of disappearing ink on planning documents and promises.

Public transit isn’t a nice to have. It’s a public service. Just like roads, schools and clean water. When we have frequent, reliable, easy-to-understand public transit it benefits our workers, our businesses, residents and tourists. Our economy and downtown flourishes too. Everybody wins. 

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Chris Hamilton is the founder of Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown, a local advocacy group championing sustainable mobility and vibrant public spaces. Subscribe to the blog and follow on Facebook, Twitter, and Substack for updates. All stories are cross posted at KONK Life News. Originally from Washington, D.C., Chris spent over two decades leading nationally acclaimed initiatives in transit, biking, walking, and smart growth for Arlington County, VA’s DOT. Since moving to Key West in 2015, he has embraced a car-free lifestyle downtown, dedicating his time to non-profits and community projects. Explore all Streets for People column articles here.

Who Keeps the Lights On When the Tropic Goes Dark?

Posted on July 18, 2026     1 Comment

Anchor Institutions: The people and places that hold Key West together | Chris Hamilton | July 18, 2026 | Crossposted at The Citizen

I sit on a little ledge in the heat on a sultry sun-drenched July morning last week in front of the Tropic Cinema on Eaton Street, facing the iconic Seward Johnson sculpture of Marilyn Monroe where thousands of locals and tourists annually snap a selfie. After a couple minutes Greg walks up, shakes my hand and says “Ready?” He’s here to open the theater for his regular once-a-week shift as House Manager and has allowed me to accompany him on his usual rounds. He pulls out a jangle of keys, unlocks the door and we duck into the familiar, darkened lobby of air-conditioned comfort and let out a sigh of relief.

He locks the door behind us and scurries over to a box on the wall to enter the security code and stop the loud beep, beep, beep that started when the door opened. Then he springs into action, flipping switches in the front closet, on the wall and by handling remotes. He’s obviously done this before. On pop the lights overhead and ahead of us in the café concession area. TVs come alive and start previewing coming attractions. He snakes his way through the concessions and turns on machines and more lights, under and over the counters, including backlit menu boards listing beer, wine and refreshments.

I’m hoping he’ll turn on the popcorn machine. Mmm, hot buttered movie theater popcorn. But he heads for the bathroom, turns on the lights. I hear flushes. And then he disappears into the back three theaters, the Carper, Taylor and George. More lights. More chirping and activity. Just another typical day getting ready for customers coming to watch the latest movies. Except there won’t be any. 

Tropic Cinema Closes Its Doors

See, the Tropic closed its doors for the summer on Sunday, June 28. Its board of directors framed the closure as a response to “declining attendance and revenue pressures,” in addition to losing longtime executive director Carla Turner after nine years. They said they’d use the summer to regroup, assess and explore new options. The reaction on social media was immediate and vociferous:

“We cannot lose the Tropic. All hands on deck!”
“NO! We need to keep this gem!”
“Let’s all rally for movie nights at the Tropic!”
“Truly devastating news.”
“Man, I hate reading that. It’s a microcosm of what our world is going through, but it’s still a one-of-a-kind place. I really hope it’s just for the summer.”

That’s a small sample, on top of hundreds of “sad face” and “care” emojis.

So what’s Greg Disney-Britton, the Tuesday House Manager for the past two years, doing “opening up” the theater?

He and a core group of his co-workers are taking turns doing this every single day. Yep, every single day, even though they’re closed. They each come in for a couple of hours and do exactly what Greg’s been doing: turn everything on and make sure it’s working and in good condition. Even the projectionist comes in to make sure the film equipment is in good working order. This way each employee has a little something to do and gets a couple hours of pay a week. As Greg explains it, when new life comes they won’t need to rehire an entire staff, and they’ll know the physical plant is shipshape and ready to go. “Most of us never doubted it would reopen,” he told me. “However, we weren’t sure what that will look like.”

Tennessee Williams Theatre to the Rescue?

Greg and his colleagues got a glimpse of a potential future on July 1, just days after the closure, when the Performing Arts Centers of Key West (PACKW) — the nonprofit that operates the Tennessee Williams Theatre and KeysTix at the College of the Florida Keys — announced via Facebook that it had entered into discussions with the Key West Film Society (KWFS), the nonprofit that owns and operates the Tropic, to take over its operations. Per PACKW’s press release, as the Citizen reported on July 3:

If an agreement is reached, PACKW would take on responsibility for the operation of the Tropic Cinema at 416 Eaton Street, while preserving its identity, programming mission and its place as a beloved cultural institution in Key West. The Key West Film Society’s founding mission — to exhibit, promote and celebrate independent, foreign, documentary, classic, and culturally significant films — would be central to any future arrangement.

“The Tropic Cinema is a major part of Key West’s cultural identity,” said Matthew Rawls, Executive Director of Performing Arts Centers of Key West. “We believe that bringing Tropic Cinema within PACKW’s stewardship would allow us to protect and grow its mission for the long term, while giving it the support it needs to thrive. We are committed to preserving everything that makes Tropic Cinema special.” 

Let’s be clear: this isn’t a done deal. PACKW is currently in due diligence mode, combing through financial reports, leases, agreements and more. If everything is kosher, both boards still have to come to an agreement.

Hope Springs Eternal

The reaction on Facebook to the announcement was swift and universally positive:

“This is a fantastic partnership.”
“This would be a great collaboration of the theatre community of Key West… very exciting!”
“Great news… would love to see a revitalization of the Tropic Cinema.”
“Fabulous. The Tropic is a Treasure!”
“Thank you, Matthew!!”

Just a sampling, alongside over 400 Likes and Loves and more than 60 shares. The same comment threads that had been full of grief two weeks earlier were now full of exclamation points. When I asked Greg about it, he said:

“There’s been a lot of joy about the potential of Tennessee Williams. Joy by staff, volunteers and members. My husband and I are regular attendees at Tennessee Williams performances and always have an excellent experience there. Yes, it was a relief. It’s a perfect match.”

From Carpet Warehouse to Art-House Cinema

In their own telling, the Key West Film Society was founded in 1999 by a group of disenchanted film buffs who got together to bring documentary, independent and foreign films to Key West. Ben Egnatz, current board chair said: “For years the Film Society showed movies in various locations in town as they raised money to open a ‘bricks and mortar’ cinema.”

They found their home in 2004, renovating a former carpet warehouse at 416 Eaton Street into an intimate two-screen house — the Carper and the Taylor — with 250 seats. Soon after, the Seward Johnson Marilyn was installed out front. By 2006 they’d pushed deeper into the building and opened a third screen, the George; in 2009 they added a fourth, the Peggy Dow. To get a sense of the good times, a 2017 Keys Weekly story noted the Tropic had over 200 volunteers. And then COVID happened, and the theater shut down in March 2020.

COVID and Industry Headwinds Slam the Tropic

It didn’t reopen until September, and then only showing one film, four days a week. In 2022, the Tropic bid farewell to the Peggy Dow to reduce overhead — back down to three screens. A 2024 annual report lists 140 volunteers. And Greg’s fellow House Manager Dawn Messing tells me the current number is 87, with only 25 to 30 of those consistent. Remember, they had 200 five years before. Just before the shutdown, I caught Steven Spielberg’s summer blockbuster Disclosure Day on a Saturday night in The Carper, and there weren’t more than a dozen people in the audience. It makes one wonder: has anything really returned to pre-COVID levels in this industry?

Last week I spoke with quintessential Key West community leader, tireless philanthropist and current PACKW board chair Bryan Green about the Tropic.

“During COVID people invested in at-home systems and screens and got out of the habit of going to the theatre, and so everywhere theaters have struggled to bring people back — not just here,” he said. “And the dearth of quality blockbusters over these years hasn’t helped.”

Then there’s ticket sales. Both Bryan and Greg mentioned something I hadn’t realized: ticket money largely goes to the studios that produce the pictures. Independent theaters don’t have the leverage to negotiate better rates like AMC, Cinemark or Regal.

So 50, 80, even 90% of ticket revenue, according to some industry analysis, goes to the studios. That’s a big headwind — even full houses, when they have them, aren’t lining the Tropic’s pockets.

Here’s another. In first announcing the summer closing, Egnatz told the Citizen: “Summer months have always been challenging here in Key West and unfortunately the cinema often operates at a deficit during that time, which is the opposite for cinemas in other areas of the country.” That’s those dozen people on a summer Saturday.

So COVID getting people out of the theater-going habit, ticket sales largely going to the studios, and even the summer season are all forcing the Tropic to lean on concessions. That’s why popcorn and Cokes go for $5.50, $6.50 and $7.50 — so maybe next time, don’t moan at the price. And if tickets and concessions don’t cover operations, that leaves donations. So buy that membership, too.

What the Tropic Means to Our Community and Downtown

People going out to a movie are likely to grab a bite or a drink before or after the show. Maybe they’ll stroll down Duval and duck into a shop or two. That multiplier effect is why the Tropic Cinema is a meaningful anchor for a walkable, vibrant, more prosperous downtown. Here’s how Greg put it:
“Since we retired to Key West, Eaton Street has been the center of our social life. From the Studios of Key West, Key West Theatre, Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church to the Tropic! Every other week we are at Flaming Buoy and The Saint, because there’s so much within one block!”

Bryan Green posited an interesting theory. “I think of the arts as the new third space — the community buildings or spaces that bring residents together. The Tropic is an anchor for that along Eaton.”

Greg agreed: “I do think of the arts as the new third space. It’s the community-building space that brings residents together for recreation, and the Tropic is an anchor for that along Eaton, and that general vicinity — like the Red Barn, Books and Books, the Studios and the Key West Theatre and the many smaller galleries.”

Greg and Bryan are exactly right, and I’ve been writing about this for years. All the little nonprofit theaters, live-music venues, cabarets and art-houses in a walkable downtown are the golden goose that keeps our economy going. We need to nurture them all.

Why PACKW Operating the Tropic Is the Right Instinct

Bryan Green thinks the world of Rawls, and says Matt “envisions a more vibrant, welcoming space people WANT to come to — to meet and talk before and after a wider variety of film; a renovated foyer; more events across the three auditoria.” He adds: “There’s a terrific amount of goodwill and enthusiasm at the prospect of a younger, energetic and imaginative team being given the opportunity to make this place truly special again.” We’ve witnessed that exact sentiment on social media.

Bryan also shared something that resonated with me, since I work part-time at another little nonprofit, the Red Barn Theatre. When the Tropic announced it was hunting for a new executive director, the Tennessee Williams team recognized the trap: the cinema now had to go find an ED, maybe a bookkeeper, a lawyer, all the scaffolding a nonprofit needs. And that’s doubly hard in Key West, where so many nonprofits run on a razor’s edge — stretched thin, duplicating positions, all chasing the same small pool of talent and donors. PACKW already had those positions, and some capacity to stretch. The missions lined up. And KeysTix already sells tickets for the Tropic and most of the other arts venues in town. So they approached the Film Society’s board — and here we are, in earnest discussions and due diligence to bring the Tropic under PACKW’s wing.

The Flagship Anchor of Our Downtown Doesn’t Go Dark

The Tropic can become an even greater flagship anchor downtown under PACKW and Tennessee Williams’ leadership. That’s a major reason we should all be rooting for this to work out.

Picture it, a couple of months from now. Greg unlocks the Tropic doors, disarms the alarm and starts turning everything on. Except on this occasion, a bunch of volunteers follow him in. That popcorn machine gets turned on — and this time you can hear it and smell it. Mmmm hot buttered movie theater popcorn for real. Soon there are lines for tickets and food. Laughter fills the air, the TVs are playing previews, and people are making plans for drinks afterward. That’s Key West as it should be.

# # #

Chris Hamilton is the founder of Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown, a local advocacy group championing sustainable mobility and vibrant public spaces. Subscribe to the blog and follow on Facebook, Twitter, and Substack for updates. All stories are cross posted at KONK Life News. Originally from Washington, D.C., Chris spent over two decades leading nationally acclaimed initiatives in transit, biking, walking, and smart growth for Arlington County, VA’s DOT. Since moving to Key West in 2015, he has embraced a car-free lifestyle downtown, dedicating his time to non-profits and community projects. Explore all Streets for People column articles here.

U.S. Radio 1 Interviews Chris Hamilton About Rebuilding Key West Plaza and the Drop In Key West’s Bike Ratings

Posted on July 6, 2026     Leave a Comment

Streets for People | Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown | Chris Hamilton | July 6, 2026

Chris Hamilton joined Nick Wright on his evening edition to talk about the June 27 story about Key West Plaza (formerly Kmart) being redeveloped into yet another car-centric strip mall with a sea of parking that looks like it could be plopped down on any highway on the mainland. And no housing to boot. They also talked about the recent drop in Key West’s score in the PeopleforBikes City Ratings and what that means about our lack of bike infrastructure. What ties the two stories together Is building for cars instead of building for people. In both cases we can do better.

Listen to the interview here:

Key Plaza Could Be Key West. They’re Giving Us Boca.

Posted on June 27, 2026     3 Comments

Streets for People  |  Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown  |  Chris Hamilton  |  June 27, 2026

Drive into Key West on North Roosevelt Boulevard and tell me you have any indication you’ve arrived in paradise.

Four lanes, a turn lane, traffic moving like it’s got somewhere better to be. McDonald’s, Walgreens, Home Depot, multiple car dealers, a Wendy’s, Dunkin Donuts and more. Big signs shouting at you because the stores sit a football field back behind their parking lots and need the help. Save for the palms along the water, you could be on US-1 outside Boca or US-41 outside Naples or any stretch of asphalt on the mainland. We built the one ugly mile in America’s prettiest island town, and we built it to look like everywhere else.

Now we’re slowly rebuilding it. And you know what – yea, it’s going to look refreshed and better, and it’s going to be exactly the same.

Couple years back, the Overseas Market got a facelift — new parking lot, more trees, a roundabout people actually talked about for a minute. But still the exact same auto-oriented strip mall. Fencing just went up at Searstown as it’s about to be torn down and rebuilt. Same massive parking lots fronting the Boulevard and indistinguishable from what’s there now, save that it will be prettier. And this Thursday, the city’s Development Review Committee took its first look at a development proposal to totally rebuild Key Plaza, the Publix-anchored center at Roosevelt and Kennedy that used to have a Kmart. Guess what? Surprise surprise. They’ve proposed another glorified and gussied up asphalt wonderland.

Three shopping centers, three rebuilds, and every one of them a nicer, hardened, better-drained version of the same old mainland strip mall. And not one of these projects chose to build any housing. Win the engineering, lose the heart and soul of the island.

Yes, there’s some good happening with these redevelopments — and we’ll get to it. But let’s walk through what we keep getting wrong, why it matters way past N. Roosevelt Boulevard, and consider what if anything the city can still do about it. Come explore with me.

A Better Version of the Same Thing

The Key Plaza plan is, by almost any measure, better than the sad, flood-prone asphalt lake sitting there now. The 1970s buildings come down and go back up to current flood code. The new Publix gets lifted a full story with parking tucked underneath — exactly the kind of smart, elevated design this island needs more of. Total retail actually shrinks by about 64,000 square feet, the stormwater gets fixed so the lot stops flooding every time it rains, and the plans add roughly 130,000 square feet of new landscaping. You can read the full rundown of what’s proposed in in today’s Key West Citizen paper.

All real. All better. But better is not the same as different. This is a better version of the same thing — but better than terrible isn’t the bar. Not here in Paradise.

Makeup on a Parking Lot

So here’s what bugs me.

There is nothing — not one thing — about this design that says Key West. Drop these site plans on a desk in Boca, in Naples, in Fort Myers, in any one of a thousand mainland Florida suburbs, and nobody would blink. The anchor sits at the back of the lot. The parking sits out front, fronting both North Roosevelt and Kennedy Drive. A few small retail pods float near the street so you can see clear through them to the big boxes behind. Cars first, buildings second. It’s the formula every strip mall in America has followed since about 1975, and we’re about to pour it fresh on the most valuable two-by-four-mile patch of island in America.

The city’s own slide shows the plan builds 704 parking spaces — and notes, right there on screen, that it still exceeds code. Nobody required all that asphalt. The code asked for less (636) – which to us still seems excessive. And that asphalt takes up almost 60% of the entire 19 acres with 22% accounted for in buildings and 20% for so called “open space/landscaping.” 

The plan dresses this up promising much more “green space” – going from 5% to 20% and noted as “open space/landscaping” in the data table. That’s got to be good, right? But look at where that “green” actually ends up. It’s the skinny islands between parking rows. It’s the landscaped strips around the edges. The application gives away the bias as the buffers along North Roosevelt are there to “screen the commercial activity and present a more attractive appearance to passing drivers.” Are you kidding me, more attractive for people in cars on the highway – insert eyeroll emoji here. The landscaping isn’t a park, or a plaza, or a place. It’s makeup on a parking lot — greenery whose job is to hide the asphalt from people driving past. That’s not open space. That’s a nicer-looking windshield view.

Here’s what really cheeses me, as someone who spent a career around this stuff. Nobody builds this way anymore — not if you’re thinking about people and community. Go look at what Publix itself is building on the mainland (we’ll get there). The whole industry has spent twenty years relearning what Duval Street never forgot: people want to walk, they want to stroll from store to store. They want the storefront at the sidewalk, the door right there, the parking tucked behind or below where it isn’t the first and last thing you see. Why is there no retail fronting the Boulevard? Why nothing built up to Kennedy with the parking pushed to the rear, main-street style, stitched into the neighborhood behind it? On an island this small, this walkable and bikable, this starved for the real thing — why did nobody reach for it?

So I asked them. After the meeting, I put it straight to the applicant’s team: did you consider a more urban, street-front layout — the massing toward Roosevelt and Kennedy, the parking behind, something less suburban? The answer, flat as the parking lot itself: “No. Didn’t consider urban or anything else.” Didn’t consider it. On nineteen acres. On this island. It never crossed the table.

And here’s the kicker — this isn’t a money problem. When I asked what the project will cost, they told me it’s well north of $20 million, comparable to the roughly $37 million going into Searstown. So we’re not talking about a developer pinching pennies and giving us what they can afford. We’re talking about a $37-million investment that couldn’t spare a single thought for whether this might look or work like Key West instead of Boca. It’s not the cheapest thing they could build. It’s the least they could be bothered to imagine.

I know the answer I’ll get. Everything around it looks like this, so this is what fits. But somebody, on some project, has to be the one that breaks the pattern instead of pouring it again. That’s how a trend starts. One developer, one site, one site plan that looks like a small city instead of a county road.

This matters way past Roosevelt Boulevard — because every time we hand someone another acre of free parking out front, we’re not just building a store. We’re training a habit. We teach people that the way you get anything in Key West is you drive to it and you park at the door. Then they take that expectation downtown — where the streets are narrow, the parking’s tight, and the whole magic of the place depends on people getting out of their cars. They circle Duval hunting for a Doris Day spot that was never coming. Or they just don’t go, because N. Roosevelt taught them parking is a right and downtown doesn’t deliver it. The walkable downtown is the product this island sells. N. Roosevelt keeps quietly undercutting it, one rebuilt parking lot at a time.

Housing: Publix Knows How. So Does the City.

Here’s the elephant in the room. We are a 4-by-2-mile island with the worst housing crisis in Florida. Our nurses commute from Homestead. Our line cooks sleep in their cars. And here sits 19 acres — nineteen! — getting demolished and rebuilt from the dirt up, a generational do-over on one of the biggest developable parcels in the city. And not one bedroom is part of the plan. Not one. I asked them that too — was housing ever considered? “No.” That was the whole answer.

Now, the easy thing is to dump this all on Publix, and Publix has earned some of it. But before we do, look at what this same company builds when somebody asks them to. In Charleston — a historic, flood-prone coastal city not unlike ours — Publix sits on the ground floor of a nine-story building with apartments stacked above it. [Link: WestEdge] In downtown Coral Gables, Publix is replacing an old single story store and building an 18-story residential tower on top of a new Publix. [LINK: Coral Gables] In Raleigh, there’s a Publix with 400-some apartments sitting right on top of it. [LINK: Publix at Peace] That’s just a sampling. This isn’t exotic. This is Publix’s own playbook, the one they run in any market where the locals expect more than a parking lot. 

And it’s not just a mainland thing. Drive up to Tavernier and watch a Publix get built right now with 86 units of workforce housing behind it. It took the developer three brutal years — staff said no, neighbors fought it, the state said no and then reversed — but it is happening, in the Keys, ROGO and all. So nobody gets to say it can’t be done here.

Which leaves two questions.

First: why does Publix think so little of Key West? In Charleston and Coral Gables and Raleigh they bring their A-game — street-fronting, housing on top, structured parking, the works. Here, on the most special island in America, they bring us the cheapest thing that clears the code. They lifted their own store a full floor and tucked parking underneath, so we know the talent was in the room. They just didn’t spend it on us. And here’s what makes it sting: back in 2021, when the City floated the idea of housing over these centers, Commissioner Sam Kaufman said the City had already heard Publix itself was interested in building employee housing. Interested. Five years ago. Somebody just had to pick up the phone and hold them to it.

Which is the second question, and the one that should keep all of us asking questions this election season: where was the City? This wasn’t a surprise that landed out of nowhere. Back in 2021, Commissioners Kaufman and Mary Lou Hoover did the work — they ran a community survey on the future of North Roosevelt and 770 people answered. Want to know what those people asked for? Bike and pedestrian-friendly design, 74%. Mixed-use residential and commercial, far up the list. Parking tucked behind or inside the buildings instead of fronting the road. The public told the City exactly what it wanted on this Boulevard — and the plans rolling through today deliver almost the precise opposite.

And we did this exact dance just last year with Searstown, a few blocks up the Boulevard — same attorney, same four-phase shuffle, renderings so alike you could swap them and not notice. When that one came through with zero housing, Kaufman cast the lone no vote, reminded everyone the city had already approved a density bonus of 40 units per acre specifically to get housing built over these very centers, and asked how many more times we were going to drop the ball. Commissioner Hoover agreed we’d dropped it — and then voted yes anyway along with Mayor Henriquez, Vice Mayor Carey, and Commissioners Castillo, Haskell and Lee. That was a lost opportunity. We can’t make the same mistake again.

I sat through that whole DRC meeting. Every department in the building had a representative at the table — Planning, Engineering, Fire, Utilities, Police, the bike-and-pedestrian folks, even the tree people and ADA. Smart, dedicated public servants, every one, and they asked good, hard questions about stormwater and hydrants and traffic signals and sidewalks. For forty minutes. And in all that time, on a generational redevelopment of nineteen acres in a housing emergency, not one person asked the question: where are the homes? 

Which makes me wonder. Housing is one of the City’s four stated strategic priorities. Every other discipline gets a seat at that table. So why isn’t there one for housing? When a 19-acre site comes up for its first review, shouldn’t somebody in that room have the job of asking whether it should include homes? I don’t know the answer. But it sure seems like a question worth asking out loud.

That’s the part that hurts. The tool exists. The City built the density incentive in 2019 to do exactly this, on exactly these parcels. The public asked for it in 2021. Publix was reportedly interested. We’ve even found the ROGO units when we wanted them — we found them for the Lofts at Trumbo, we found them for the Lofts at Bahama Village, both downtown, both recent, both for workers. Every piece was on the table. And on Searstown, the Commission looked right at it, named it, and approved the parking lot anyway. Now Key Plaza rolls up with the same empty space where the housing should be, and the only question that matters is whether anyone at the City does one thing differently this time.

It isn’t just me. Linda Grist Cunningham — my friend, a local writer, and something close to this island’s conscience — looked at the Searstown plan and said she’d be a lot happier if the city had required two or three floors of housing on top. She talked about it here too. And every time these projects come up on Facebook, there’s the same chorus: hey, why not put some housing up there? When the island’s conscience and the car-free crank and half the comment section all land in the same place, that’s not an agenda. That’s just the obvious thing, sitting there unbuilt.

It’s Not Too Late to Get This Right

It’s like déjà vu all over again as in 2022 we wrote this story: “Time to Reimagine Car-Centric, Mainland Style Searstown and Kmart Into Island-Friendly Centers with Housing.” And here we are again. And maybe this time we can get it right as Thursday was the first look, not the last. Nothing’s poured. Nothing’s approved. From here Key Plaza goes to the Planning Board, then the City Commission — the developer’s own attorney told me the whole process could run another year and a half. That’s not a closed door. It’s a wide-open window.

But a window only matters if somebody climbs through it. These projects sail through with no housing and no imagination not because anyone’s twirling a mustache, but because the room is quiet — the applicant brings what’s easiest, the process checks its boxes, and unless someone stands up and says we want more than this, more than this never gets asked for. Searstown sailed through that quiet. This one doesn’t have to. 

So if you’ve read this far, you’re the someone. Email your commissioners and the people running this summer. Show up when Key Plaza reaches the Planning Board and say it plain: buildings to the street, parking behind, and homes for the people who keep this island running. It’s a once-in-a-generation rebuild. We don’t get a do-over on the do-over.

We want to make that turn at the Triangle, head down the Boulevard, and know — in our bones, before you’ve read a sign — that we’re not on the mainland anymore. That we’re someplace that decided to be itself. We can build that. Or we can build a nicer place to park, indistinguishable from every place else. We can do better. Do we have the guts to reach for it?

# # #

Chris Hamilton is the founder of Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown, a local advocacy group championing sustainable mobility and vibrant public spaces. Subscribe to the blog and follow on Facebook, Twitter, and Substack for updates. All stories are cross posted at KONK Life News. Originally from Washington, D.C., Chris spent over two decades leading nationally acclaimed initiatives in transit, biking, walking, and smart growth for Arlington County, VA’s DOT. Since moving to Key West in 2015, he has embraced a car-free lifestyle downtown, dedicating his time to non-profits and community projects. Explore all Streets for People column articles here.

Key West’s Bike Score Slipped — and It’s Telling Us Something About Safety for Everybody

Posted on June 20, 2026     Leave a Comment

Streets for People  |  Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown  |  Chris Hamilton  |  June 20, 2026

PeopleforBikes just released its ninth annual City Ratings report, and Key West’s score of 63 ranks #3 in Florida — and #232 out of 3,019 places rated across the country, the top 8 percent. Not bad for our little island paradise.

Cities are scored on a 100-point scale using a Bicycle Network Analysis, or BNA, which measures how easily people can reach everyday destinations — jobs, schools, parks, grocery stores, essential services — by connected, safe, low-stress bike routes. PeopleforBikes calls a score of 50 the critical tipping point toward real bikeability, and only 555 of those 3,019 places cleared it. On an island this small and flat, we already know the answer in our bones: yes, you can get most places by bike.

So, a good score isn’t a surprise. The real questions are why it dropped — we were at 69 last year — and why we aren’t doing even better, given everything we’ve got going for us.

Here’s the thing that caught my eye. This year’s BNA “Stress Network” map of Key West looks eerily familiar. It’s almost a tracing of the University of Florida’s analysis of our actual police crash data — 2018 to 2024, cars, pedestrians, and bikes — in the recently adopted Key West Safety Action Plan. Two different reports. Two different methods. No shared data. PeopleforBikes looked at street speed and bike infrastructure. UF looked at where people actually crashed. And they landed on the same streets. That’s not a coincidence. It’s confirmation: where it’s unsafe for bikes, it’s unsafe for everybody.

The good news is we’ve already got a plan for this. Below, let’s walk through Key West’s 2026 numbers, why the score slipped even though it’s still strong, how we stack up against other cities, what the stress map and the crash map are telling us together, and what we do about it. Let’s go.

The 2026 Numbers in Context

This is PeopleforBikes’ ninth annual ranking and our seventh time covering Key West’s score (2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020). At 63 out of 100, we’re third in Florida and number 232 of 3,019 places nationwide — the top 8 percent.

About That Drop to #3 in Florida

For the past few years, we’ve been number one in Florida. What happened? PeopleforBikes added about 500 new places this year, and two of them landed above us. Sanibel scored 77 — a 6,400-person barrier island on Florida’s Gulf coast wrapped in separated bike paths. Odessa scored 70 — a small census-designated community in Pasco County, north of Tampa.

Now, I’ll be honest about something I’ve raised with PeopleforBikes before: there’s a built-in tilt toward tiny places in how this works. The BNA measures whether you can reach destinations on low-stress streets — and in a very small community, even a little bit of good infrastructure can connect the whole place. It’s part of why the very top of the national list is dominated by small resort towns. So Sanibel and Odessa sitting above us isn’t the full story.

Because look past those two, and the picture changes. The first full-size city below Key West is Ponte Vedra at 55 — eight points back. Then the rest of urban Florida falls off a cliff: Miami Beach 48, Tampa 42, Orlando 37, Miami 28. Key Largo, right in our own backyard, 40. The mainland Florida scores are, frankly, dreadful — but that’s what you’d expect from places built entirely around the car. So we’re not in third place in any way that matters. We’re alone at the top of real-city Florida. And that’s exactly the kind of only-in-Key-West distinction worth protecting. More on that in a bit.

Some Sister-City and Other Comparisons

How does that 63 stack up against places more like us? We often think of Provincetown, Massachusetts — another tourist town at the end of the line. In days of yore, there was a steady stream of Key West workers heading up to the Cape for the summer season and circling back here come fall. Ptown scored 75. That’s something to strive toward. A few others worth a look: Boulder, Colorado — the national gold standard for a city that made bikes its brand — sits at 66, just three points ahead of us. Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, came in at 59. And then the cautionary tales: St. Augustine, Florida — our state’s other famous historic, walkable, tourist-driven town — scored 21. Asheville, North Carolina, 19. Ocala, where so many Conchs landed in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, also 19. Places with a similar vibe: New Orleans, Louisiana, 33, and Park City, Utah, 53.

The point? The places everyone assumes are bikeable mostly aren’t — and Key West is doing pretty well. Our bikeability could be a real calling card.

Why Key West’s Score Dropped from 69 to 63

Here’s what I want to be clear about: biking in Key West did not get more dangerous between last year and this year. Ryan Stachurski, the City’s Multi-Modal Coordinator, said as much to me, and he’s right. And we’ve written about that good and steady progress recently. So how does the score drop six points if nothing on the ground got worse?

Because last year’s map was the problem. It told us our streets were safer than they really were.

The score didn’t drop because we tore out bike lanes — we’ve added them the past couple of years, on United and South Streets. It dropped because PeopleforBikes changed the ruler. Under new national design standards from NACTO, a painted bike lane on a street faster than 20 mph no longer counts as low-stress — because it isn’t. That’s why Whitehead, Duval, Simonton, and Eaton, among others, turned red: paint, or nothing at all, on streets where cars move too fast. The old score leaned mostly on speed limits and downtown City streets are mostly 20 mph – so in the old rubric were considered safe. This year’s methodology looks at the real infrastructure — shared lanes, conventional lanes, buffered lanes, protected lanes — alongside speed, and whether any of it actually connects. 

This shows up when you look at last year’s map and you’ll see the issue: in all of Old Town, only Flagler and Truman showed up red. Everything else read as comfortable. But Whitehead, Simonton, Duval, and Eaton have no real bike infrastructure — and on the Safety Plan’s crash map, they’re exactly where the wrecks pile up. Last year’s map said low-stress. The crash data said otherwise. This year’s map finally tells the truth.

And the proof it’s not just us? Nationally, the bar went up, and the average score still climbed, from 25 to 36. The standards got stricter and the country got better at the same time. We slipped against a rising tide.

Where We Stand — 63 Is Good

63 still clears PeopleforBikes’ “great place to bike” line of 50 comfortably. We’ve got real advantages — four miles by two, flat, warm, gridded, a mostly 20 mph island. And we’ve earned part of the score: brand-new lanes on South and United where there were none, the rebuilt Staples Avenue Bike/Ped Bridge, improvements to the Crosstown Greenway, more bike parking and fix-it stations across the island. But “best in Florida” was always partly a gift of geography. The question this year’s more honest map puts to us is the one worth asking: if we start this far ahead, why aren’t we finishing?

One footnote on the score, since it’ll come up: our lowest category is transit, at 45. Don’t read too much into it. On an island this size, the transit metric barely matters — it’s really built for big cities, and plenty of top-scoring small towns have no transit at all. The BNA counted essentially the airport and the Key West Express boat and the little bit of fixed transit we have left. It’s not where our work is – at least as it pertains to bike safety.

The BNA Stress Map and the Crash Map Are the Same Map

The BNA Stress Map’s red streets and the University of Florida’s Density Map for All Crashes are the same streets. The bike model flags them as high-stress; the crash data flags them as where people actually get hurt — and sometimes killed. That’s independent confirmation that the red isn’t an abstraction. It’s a casualty map. And the crashes include cars. Fixing these streets isn’t a favor to cyclists. It’s where drivers, walkers, the kid on an e-bike, and the tourist on a scooter are getting hurt. The bike network’s weak points and the island’s deadly points are the same points. Even if you’ll never ride a bike, you drive and walk these streets — so we all have a stake in fixing them.

Shouldn’t Key West Be Doing Better?

Yes, we should. Key West has natural advantages most cities lack. We’re small. Flat. A compact street grid. Good weather year round. And in recent years we’ve put real money into infrastructure. On top of that, we don’t have to invent any new roadmaps — we’ve already adopted a Bicycle/Pedestrian Master Plan (2019) and just recently a Safety Action Plan, with 36 projects, 23 policies, price tags, and a federal Safe Streets funding path. Those plans name the exact streets we need to fix. The BNA red map, the UF crash map, and the City’s own project list are all pointing at the same corridors.

Ryan Stachurski sees the BNA the same way — as a map of where to work next, not a verdict. The analysis, he says, “can highlight areas of opportunity when it comes to improving bicycle mode comfort and connectivity” — and some of those areas, he notes, “have already been reflected in other plans and targeted for future improvement, or in some cases, may have already been improved.” He encourages riders to flag the rough spots themselves through Key West Connect, the City’s request system for unsafe crossings and improvements.

The fix is funding the plans and making connections — stitching the disjointed lanes into a network. Because the new rubric rewards networks, not one-off projects. Look at the BNA Infrastructure Map of Key West and you’ll see the problem: lots of little pieces of bike infrastructure with gaps between them, not at all stitched together. The whole point is a connected, low-stress network. THAT is what gets people riding, because people are afraid when the infrastructure just abruptly ends.

A quick caveat: the PeopleforBikes Infrastructure Map doesn’t yet include South Street, and it doesn’t seem to recognize the Crosstown Greenway. The maps are built on OpenStreetMap data, so just fixing those entries may bump our score on its own.

But here’s what we meant at the top of the story when we said doing better can be our calling card – the only-in-Key West distinction worth protecting. Year after year, we track these rankings and dig into the PeopleforBikes data not for the score, but for what the score represents. The walkable, bikeable island is the product. It’s what sets us apart from all those car-centric places on the mainland. It’s what the engaged visitor flew here for. It’s the Golden Goose that funds everything else — and done right, THAT’s Key West’s calling card.

It’s also the most direct affordability lever we’ve got: on a flat four-by-two island, a bike — or an e-bike — is the cheapest way for a worker to live here without a $580-to-$1,100-a-month car. Better bike streets keep workers, keep character, keep Key West Key West.

What Needs to Happen Next

Fund the Safety Action Plan’s projects. Chase the Safe Streets grant match. Connect the bike lanes we already have. Follow the red — the BNA’s map and UF’s map already drew the to-do list. And at upcoming candidate forums, it’s fair to ask everyone running for commission or mayor one straight question: Will you fund the Safety Action Plan and the buildout of the Bike/Ped Master Plan?

So, back to where we opened. Two maps, drawn by people who never spoke to each other, using two completely different methods, agreeing on which streets are dangerous. We can keep treating that as a bike story and shrug. Or we can see it for what it is — a safety story, an affordability story, a keeping-Key-West-Key-West story — and finish the plans already sitting on the shelf. If it’s unsafe for bikes, it’s unsafe for everybody. That’s the whole thing, right there.

# # #

Chris Hamilton is the founder of Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown, a local advocacy group championing sustainable mobility and vibrant public spaces. Subscribe to the blog and follow on Facebook, Twitter, and Substack for updates. All stories are cross posted at KONK Life News. Originally from Washington, D.C., Chris spent over two decades leading nationally acclaimed initiatives in transit, biking, walking, and smart growth for Arlington County, VA’s DOT. Since moving to Key West in 2015, he has embraced a car-free lifestyle downtown, dedicating his time to non-profits and community projects. Explore all Streets for People column articles here.

Key West’s Mount Rushmore Deserves a Real Plaza, Not a Street With an Appendage

Posted on May 30, 2026     Leave a Comment

Streets for People  |  Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown  |  Chris Hamilton  |  May 30, 2026

Picture it. The Duval Street Pocket Park, last Saturday at 1 PM. A line of happy tourists waits to take a photo with the Southernmost Point buoy. Kids running around. A musician playing nearby. A cyclist threading through without anyone batting an eye. The City spokeswoman has said the replica is even more popular with visitors than the original location. And more than a few locals in the Facebook comment threads about this project have said the same thing: leave it where it is. It works.

That’s not an accident. It works because it’s a plaza.

Meanwhile, one block south, the original site is fenced off. On May 7, the City Commission voted 7-0 to delay awarding the construction bid for the Southernmost Point Plaza project. They paused because a few neighbors — including the Morgan family, who own property near the corner — asked them to. The item comes back to the Commission on June 4.

Here’s the part worth sitting with. The design they’re objecting to is already a heavily watered-down version of what was on the table in 2023. And what was on the table in 2023 was what the residents of the Southernmost Point neighborhood themselves asked the City for in April 2021. The City listened. The City designed it with them. And then, in August 2024, for reasons we’re still trying to fully understand, the City reversed itself and watered the whole thing down. That’s the project now on hold.

Five years after the residents made their ask, the original plaza vision is still on the shelf at City Hall. The question for June 4 is whether we pour concrete on the watered-down version, or whether we use the pause to bring back what the neighborhood asked for in the first place.

I think we should bring back what the neighborhood asked for because it was a great design that worked for everyone, residents and tourists. Walk with me. We’ll look at why this iconic corner matters, what the residents put on the record in 2021 and what it led to, how it got rolled back, where the neighborhood association actually stands today, and what June 4 should look like.

Key West’s Mount Rushmore

Earlier this month, Garden & Gun magazine ran a national feature on the Southernmost Point buoy. The piece quoted Conch Republic Speaker of the House and Shop Mom and Pop Key West leader Paul Menta calling the buoy “the Mount Rushmore of Key West.” It cited an estimate of roughly 85 million photos taken at that corner over the buoy’s lifetime.

Eighty-five million. Let that one breathe.

This isn’t a corner that became important when someone planted a concrete buoy there. The location was strategically significant as far back as 1917, when an underwater telephone cable linking Key West to Havana was laid here — the small concrete cable hut built to protect the connection still stands a few feet from the buoy today. During World War II, when the Navy fenced off most local beaches, this stretch of shoreline served as a vital public beach for Key West’s Black community and a working harbor where local fishermen docked their boats.

By the 1960s, the corner had become a gathering spot for visitors and a small informal marketplace where local vendors sold conch shells and sea sponges. The first hand-painted wooden “Southernmost Point” signs went up around the same time. The concrete buoy followed in 1983. In 2015, the City added the Bishop Albert Kee statue — honoring the man who had sold those conch shells and coconuts at the corner since the 1960s, a Key West character whose decades at the spot became part of what made it the spot.

Sixty-five years of meaning layered one decade at a time, onto the same patch of ground.

This is the most photographed corner in the state of Florida. Arguably in the South. Hundreds of thousands of visitors a year line up there. Every cruise passenger walking south from the dock ends up there. Every honeymoon, every bachelorette weekend, every family vacation, every conch on a homecoming visit eventually points a camera at that buoy. It’s on tee shirts and postcards, refrigerator magnets in every shop on Duval, even on a bobblehead. It is, by any honest measure, the single most iconic landmark in the Florida Keys.

Now look at what’s there. A buoy on a beat-up apron of pavement at the end of a residential street. A seawall that Hurricane Ian damaged and that’s been waiting four years for repair. Sidewalks too narrow for the crowds. Tourists spilling into the roadway to get the shot.

That’s the Mount Rushmore of Key West? We can do better. We have to do better. And the people who live nearest to it have been telling the City exactly that since 2021.

What the Residents Asked For

April 15, 2021. Fifteen residents gathered at 401 Whitehead Street for the founding meeting of what would become the Southernmost Point Community Association. District 6 Commissioner Clayton Lopez was there. Acting City Manager Patti McLauchlin was there. The City’s Transportation Manager was there. The City listened.

The residents proposed a strategic plan for the area. From the official minutes of that meeting:

“It was suggested by the SMPC that the City generate a strategic plan for the Southernmost Point area as the area is one of the most visited locations on the island. Suggestions included that portions of Whitehead and South Street become one way and restricted to residential traffic and residential parking… Strategic planning would include a comprehensive tree strategy, expansion of cobblestone street pavement; appropriate soft lighting, street pedestrian walking, attractive trash cans… and 5 MPH speeds for residential vehicles.”

Read that paragraph again. One-way streets. Cobblestone. Soft lighting. Pedestrian priority. Slower speeds. Coordinated trash management. A real plaza at one of the most visited locations on the island.

That’s what the residents asked for. Not in an advocacy column. Not in some outside consultant’s report. In the official minutes of their own community group’s first meeting, presented directly to the City’s senior leadership and recorded for the record.

Same meeting, same residents, also flagged the flooding at United and Whitehead as a problem they wanted addressed. The community connected the dots between drainage and street redesign from day one.

Here’s the line that’s stuck with me from those 2021 minutes. Commissioner Clayton Lopez floated a clean-up campaign slogan to help educate visitors: “Your vacation paradise, our neighborhood and home.” That phrase has been kicking around the Southernmost Point neighborhood ever since. Peter Janker — who chairs the community association today — repeated it to me this week. It’s the right frame. What works for the people who live there works for the people who visit. The plaza concept comes from the residents themselves, because the residents understood from day one that a calmer, more beautiful, more functional corner makes the place work for everyone.

What the City Designed With Them

Between 2021 and 2023, City staff worked with the community to translate that vision into a buildable design. Gary Volenec, then the City Engineer, was the technical hand. He talked to the residents. He talked to the Police and Fire Chiefs — both said one-way wouldn’t be a problem. He sketched a plaza concept built around what the neighborhood had asked for.

One-way street from Duval to Whitehead. A raised flush curb — the sidewalk and the roadway at the same elevation, with the whole roadbed lifted onto a low table. Seating steps. Shade. Landscaping. Room for food trucks at the Duval end. Room for the pedestrians who today spill into traffic because the sidewalks are too narrow. Even room for delivery vehicles to the local restaurants, designed in from the start.

The raised flush curb is the design detail doing the most work. A 5 mph sign is one thing. A vehicle having to negotiate up onto a raised table is another. The street itself becomes the speed cue. Drivers feel they’re someplace different the moment they enter the block, and they behave accordingly. That’s the principle behind every successful pedestrian-priority street treatment in the country — from European woonerfs to the Duval Pocket Park to Lazy Way. Design the road to slow people down and you don’t need to keep arguing with them about it.

Volenec told me bluntly last week why two-way doesn’t work on this corner: “It is just too narrow to have two way traffic plus parking and pedestrians and bikes mixing in. Two lanes is just crazy.”

The 2023 design – the featured image at top was a draft rendering – lined up with three of the City’s own Key West Forward strategic plan priorities: sea level rise, roads and sidewalks, traffic and pedestrian friendliness. It hardened the area against rising water — which is going to keep rising whether we like it or not. And it was Key West’s own playbook applied to the island’s most-visited corner. The Duval Street Pocket Park opened in 2019, replacing a parking lot with a hybrid pedestrian plaza right at the foot of Duval — the space where the replica buoy now sits, and where it’s working. Lazy Way got reimagined as a shared street, a woonerf where pedestrians lead and cars are guests. We’ve done this. We know how. The Southernmost Point Plaza was the next chapter.

How It Got Watered Down

We’d been following this project and had a story set to be published on June 11, 2024. This is from the lede in that never published story: 

“The City is holding a public meeting on June 13 to discuss making the Southernmost Point buoy area into a plaza that’s better for pedestrians and moving vehicles while addressing safety and standing water issues. The meeting will be held at City Hall from 5:30 to 8:00 pm. Here’s how the City’s website describes the intent of the project:

“The project would incorporate a one-way limited traffic flow pattern and incorporate resilience and sustainability strategies that address climate considerations, sea-level rise, increased shade, and increased bio-habitats while continuing to accommodate the needs of adjacent residential and commercial properties. The plaza would provide more space for pedestrians and improve the experience for the large crowds that visit daily. The improvements at the Southernmost Point are prepared for a complete street concept that would support three of the Key West Forward Strategic Plan priorities: Priority 2: Sea Level Rise; Priority 3: Roads and Sidewalks; Priority 6: Traffic and Pedestrian Friendliness.”

Neighboring businesses and residents are already receiving the project very positively. We all should…”

Just before the story’s publication I got a call that the meeting was canceled, so we didn’t publish the story. We later learned this was because of pushback from a subset of residents and then in August 2024 the City Commission passed a resolution authorizing a $35,425.63 change order to BCC Engineering. The purpose: undo the one-way design and redraw it as a two-way street. The cover memo from the City’s Project Manager said only that “after discussion with community members and stakeholders, the initial one-way design will need to be revised to retain the existing two-way configuration.”

Read that line again. Community members and stakeholders. But the community group — the Southernmost Point Community Association, the body that proposed the strategic plan in the first place at its founding meeting with the City’s senior leadership in the room — was on record asking for one-way. Who exactly were the community members and stakeholders the memo referenced? The memo doesn’t say. The record doesn’t say. And the result is what we have today: the original community recommendation rolled back to please a smaller group whose identities the public record never names.

Three city managers. Three engineering directors. No consistent commission champion across the four-year arc.

What’s on the Commission’s agenda for June 4 is the result. A two-way roadway narrowed from roughly 25 feet to 20 feet, with the buoy crammed onto a narrow paver arc against the seawall. Yes, new drainage and a rebuilt seawall — both genuinely needed. But compare the 2023 rendering with the 2025 rendering and the contrast is brutal. One is a public space. The other is a street with an appendage where people can take photos.

Here’s the part worth knowing. I asked Gary Volenec last week whether reviving the original 2023 design is still possible. His answer: “They didn’t throw away the design, so yes, you could go back to it. And yes, it will be a bit more expensive.”

The plan is sitting on the shelf at City Hall. Reviving it is real, not rhetorical. The question is whether the Commission has the will to do it.

The Most Credible Neighbor in the Room

Peter Janker is President of the Southernmost Point Community Association — a title that became official at the group’s most recent meeting when his neighbors nominated him on the spot. Mr. Janker has told me his association represents about 90 owners, renters, part-timers, all the local neighborhood businesses including the Butterfly Museum and people who walk dogs in the neighborhood. Its founding document is the April 2021 minutes I quoted earlier — the strategic plan recommendation the City received with full attendance from its senior leadership.

In other words, Janker isn’t a neighbor who happens to agree with the case I’m making. He’s the leader of the group whose 2021 recommendation became the 2023 plaza. That plaza is his document.

The association’s official position is to vote yes on the current compromise. They’ve taken three separate consensus checks among the membership, asking whether their concerns about the project should stop it from moving forward. Three times the answer was no. They’ve decided to support the project on the table as a pragmatic step — finish something meaningful now and continue pushing for additional improvements over time. Janker himself has told the City he hopes this project is followed up with more. As he put it when we spoke: “Missing this opportunity to proceed would be bad.” And of the petition opposing the project: “The petition if accepted would be a disservice.”

But personally — and Janker has been clear with his association about where he personally stands — he still wants what the City designed in 2023. He wants one-way. He wants 5 mph speeds (his group compromised down to a 10 mph ask). He’s compared what this corner could become to the transformation of the San Antonio Riverwalk — a ditch that became a world-class destination. And he wants the City to commit to maintaining this corner the way it maintains Mallory Square.

“This area needs to be treated like Mallory Square,” he told me. “It isn’t my vision. I believe in consensus. Personally, I want one-way also.”

Here’s the question worth asking. If the president of the neighborhood association that proposed the plaza in 2021 personally still wants the original — what is the Commission actually preserving by approving the watered-down version?

Where the Petition Misses

The petition opposing the project — now at 153 signatures on Friday the 29th — has been driving a lot of the conversation on local Facebook pages. Its lead organizer, Marcela Morgan, is the neighbor whose appeal brought the project to a halt on May 7. So, it deserves to be engaged directly, not dismissed.

Marcela Morgan and the petition signers are well within their rights to speak. Anyone who lives near a public works project gets to show up at City Hall and say their piece. That’s how this is supposed to work. And on at least one point, the petition lines up with what the engineer who designed the original plaza, the head of the neighborhood association, and the comments crowd in the Key West Locals Facebook group have been saying — the current narrow two-way design is the wrong answer. Morgan herself, in her own Facebook post, asked the question out loud: “Why not a one-way?”

Why not, indeed. Where we part company with the petition is on the answer to her question. The petition says do less — fix the drainage, repave, leave the rest alone. We say do more, because more is what the neighborhood association formally asked the City for five years ago. More is what’s right for Key West.

The petition’s most original argument is that this is “an area only tourists really use,” so the City shouldn’t be on the hook for the $3.3 million share of the project. Huh? Every public investment in Key West comes with a chorus of but what about my street, but what about the potholes, but what about Higgs Beach. Think of the children. Those are real questions. They aren’t reasons to keep building the wrong thing at the most photographed corner in the state. And they’re especially not reasons to override the founding recommendation of the neighborhood association whose vision the project was built around.

Tourism isn’t a special interest in Key West. It’s the operating system. The Tourist Development Council’s budget, the City budget, the property taxes paid by every business downtown — all of it runs on visitors. Mount Rushmore aka the Southernmost Point Buoy is the downtown Golden Goose’s most photographed asset. Of course, the City pays to maintain it, the same way it pays to maintain Mallory Square, Duval Street, the Historic Seaport and Higgs Beach. “TDC should pay more” is a fine argument. “The City should pay nothing” is abandonment.

Where We Should Land

Two choices, really. The 2023 plaza or what’s on the table now. Build the right thing or build the wrong thing for the next twenty years.

YES: The 2023 plaza. The design built around the community’s own 2021 recommendation. One-way, calmed, raised flush curb, cobblestone, soft lighting, slower speeds, integrated drainage. The thing the residents themselves asked for, and the City designed with them. Gary’s framing: slower vehicles, pedestrian priority, no conflicts. Janker’s personal preference. The full vision.

NO: The current two-way compromise. Gary doesn’t want it. Janker doesn’t personally want it. The community didn’t ask for it in 2021. The petitioners reject it too, for their own reasons. The only argument for it is finish-and-move-on — which is the official position the Southernmost Point Community Association has taken: accept what’s on the table, then push for additional improvements later. We understand that posture. We just disagree with it. Pouring concrete on a corner the City is going to live with for the next twenty years isn’t the moment to settle for less than the residents themselves asked for.

A word on the alternatives in the air. Paul Menta — owner of Key West First Legal Rum Distillery, leader of the Shop Mom and Pop Key West group, and the local-business voice who told Garden & Gun this buoy is the Mount Rushmore of Key West — has been watching this corner for four years. Because of construction, South Street has effectively been operating as a one-way during the entire build, with drivers entering from Duval and heading toward Whitehead. Paul has walked it and biked it for months. Even in season. “I have seen no problems with traffic or anything else,” he reports. “I do think it should be one way coming inbound.”

That’s powerful evidence — from someone with standing in the neighborhood and the local-business community — that one-way works here in real conditions. Paul has proposed a middle-ground design: permanent one-way inbound, with the buoy reoriented to face seaward from Whitehead so the photo line forms on the wide Navy-side sidewalk and away from residential homes. Some of the residents on the affected blocks like that idea too — a group of homeowners from South Street, Whitehead, and United sent the City a list of questions on May 14 asking, among other things, that the tourist line be relocated to the Navy fence along Whitehead. It’s a thoughtful proposal. But it requires the City to reopen the engineering drawings — to reconfigure the parking, restripe the lane, possibly widen the sidewalks once a lane is removed. Once you’re redesigning, the question isn’t how little can we change? The question is why would we redesign to anything less than what the residents already asked for and the City already designed?

Let’s Admit. If Nobody Can Agree – Keeping It Where It Is Now Is a Real Option

A note on a fourth option some readers have raised: leave the buoy at the Pocket Park where it’s already working. It’s a real option. The Saturday photos prove it.

But the residents at the original site have been clear and consistent — going back to the 2021 minutes and through every association meeting since — that they want the buoy returned to its original home. Janker tells me 90% of the neighborhood feels the same way today. The cable hut, the 1960s photographs, the closest land point to Havana — the people who live with this landmark every day have made their call. Pocket Park as a fallback if absolutely nothing else is possible. Not where we should lead though.

What June 4 Should Look Like

City Manager Brian Barroso warned the Commission on May 7 that further delay could jeopardize the more than $1 million in Tourist Development Council funding tied to the project. I appreciate the City Manager wanting to land the plane. That’s his job.

But let’s be real. The TDC pulling funding from Mount Rushmore over a process question is not a real risk. It’s a talking point. The TDC isn’t going to walk away from the highest-traffic tourist site in the county. They’re going to wait for the City to get it right.

Land the plane, yes. But on the right runway.

Here’s the ask:

One. Don’t approve the bid as-is. Use the pause. It’s an opportunity.

Two. Direct staff to revive the 2023 plaza design. Gary Volenec confirms the plan hasn’t been thrown away. The neighborhood asked for it in 2021. The City designed it with them. Build it.

Keeping Key West Key West

Picture it. 2027. The original buoy home on a real plaza. Cobblestone the residents asked for in 2021. The one-way they asked for. The slower speeds. The trees, the soft lighting. A Mount Rushmore that finally looks worthy of being the Mount Rushmore of Key West.

The Pocket Park keeps being the Pocket Park. The original site becomes the destination it always should have been. Mallory Square treatment for the most photographed corner in the state. Five years late. But right.

The Duval Pocket Park was the win of 2019. Lazy Way moved the conversation in 2022. The Southernmost Point should be the win of 2026 — or 2027 if the Commission needs another six months to do it right. That’s the right trade.

The Commission asked for more time. Use it.

# # # 

Chris Hamilton is the founder of Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown, a local advocacy group championing sustainable mobility and vibrant public spaces. Subscribe to the blog and follow on Facebook, Twitter, and Substack for updates. All stories are cross posted at KONK Life News. Originally from Washington, D.C., Chris spent over two decades leading nationally acclaimed initiatives in transit, biking, walking, and smart growth for Arlington County, VA’s DOT. Since moving to Key West in 2015, he has embraced a car-free lifestyle downtown, dedicating his time to non-profits and community projects. Explore all Streets for People column articles here.

The Lofts at Trumbo: A Win for Workers and Our Downtown — Here’s How to Make It Even Better

Posted on May 23, 2026     Leave a Comment

Streets for People  |  Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown  |  Chris Hamilton  |  May 23, 2026

The City Commission approved The Lofts at Trumbo on May 7. One hundred and fifty deed-restricted affordable apartments for teachers and school district staff, on five and a half acres of prime downtown land where dilapidated school district warehouses have been sitting for decades. Twenty-plus years in the making. A 7-0 vote.

This is a win. A real one.

Genuine congratulations to the Monroe County School District, to VestCor for getting it across the finish line, to the City Commission for moving it forward, and to the advocates and staff who hung in through every false start.

Four years ago, in the lead-up to the workforce housing referendum at the Truman Waterfront, I wrote 3 Reasons You May Not Have Thought of for Voting YES on 3.2. The argument then, and now, applauding what eventually became The Lofts at Bahama Village, came down to three reasons:

1. More locals living downtown creates a more local-focused, less touristy vibe and that’s good for the historic business district.
2. Housing downtown makes it easier to bike, walk, and use transit to get around.
3. Not being car-dependent brings livability costs down further for residents.

Win. Win. Win.

With caveats. The transit service still isn’t real. Bike parking is a perennial afterthought. Bus stops and sidewalks and bike lanes are still pieces we keep promising and not delivering.

The Lofts at Trumbo nails the first reason. It half-delivers the second. And the third hangs entirely on choices we still have time to make. Walk with me through each in our story below.

Reason 1: 150 More Workforce Households Downtown Is a Win In Itself

For the past decade a lot of workforce housing has been built up the Keys. We’ve long argued (here and here) that the proper place for locals’ affordable housing is on this island and better yet downtown. The City delivered last fall with the opening of 126 units at The Lofts of Bahama Village, and we’ve just delivered 150 more units at the Seaport at 241 Trumbo Road. Just as it should be.

A hundred and fifty workforce families coming downtown to live in a previously vacant area that’s been quiet too long. Families pushing strollers to the Bight on a Saturday morning. Kids riding bikes to the Truman Waterfront. People grabbing coffee at the Cuban Coffee Queen or eating dinner at Pepe’s or Schooner Wharf. The kind of local people the downtown loses every time a workforce family gives up and moves to Big Pine.

This matters in ways that don’t show up in the staff report. Downtown thrives when locals live there. The shops that depend on year-round customers, not just seasonal cruise passengers, do better when there are families within walking distance. The mom-and-pop businesses that make Key West feel like Key West get a customer base that comes back every week. Eyes on the street, weekday foot traffic, weekend strollers. Schools fill. The vibe shifts from theme park back toward neighborhood. Here’s how Paul Menta, owner of the Key West First Legal Rum Distillery and leader of the Shop Mom and Pop Key West group puts it:

“Keeping locals living locally in Key West has many advantages such as it keeps the local economy going as they buy at Mom-and-Pop type places, they have options to bike or bus to work, which takes the stress away of driving and parking, and they add to the ambiance of Key West by having locals walking around with tourists. Sounds funny but when you travel you want to shop and eat where the locals are!”

The Lofts at Trumbo delivers exactly that on a site that’s been dilapidated since most of us moved here. That alone makes this project a win. Everything else in this article is about making the win bigger.

Reason 2: Downtown Housing Should Make It Easier to Bike, Walk, and Use Transit. Mostly We Got This Right.

Here’s where the design gets a lot of credit and where the design falls a little short.

What the design got right: most of the parking sits under the building, not in a sea of asphalt around it. The architectural plans show 147 parking spaces on the ground floor — podium parking, covered, integrated into the building footprint. That’s the urban move. That’s how dense workforce housing should be designed on a small island where every square foot of land is precious – and how it should have been done in Bahama Village – height restriction be damned. There’s a smaller surface lot wrapping the Trumbo Road frontage, but the bulk of the parking is tucked away. Approach the site from any angle and you’ll see a four-story building, not a parking lot.

The location is right too. I walked from the project to the two nearest Lower Keys Shuttle stops this past week. Eaton at White: about 400 steps. Caroline at Grinnell: about 420 steps. Both walkable. Both reasonable. Downtown is a couple of blocks away. The bike network is right there.

The design also includes two ground-floor bike parking rooms, indoor and weather-protected, one near the north end of the building and one near the south. Indoor bike storage is better than outdoor — it survives the weather, it’s harder to steal from, and it puts the bikes where the residents are coming and going. That’s a real improvement over what you see at most multifamily projects in the Keys, including The Lofts at Bahama Village, where the racks are all outside.

So far so good. Here’s where it falls short.

The parking ratio. The Lofts at Trumbo will have 220 parking spaces for 150 units — roughly 1.47 spaces per unit. The City’s land development regulations require one space per unit in the historic district. The applicant chose to provide 70 more spaces than code required. Nobody at City Hall pushed back. Likely because too many officials use their own cars as a default.

The comparison that matters here is 1.5 miles around the corner in Bahama Village. Same developer. Same affordability mission. Similar central location. The Lofts at Bahama Village ended up at 99 parking spaces for 126 units — 0.79 per unit, well below code — after the City and advocates worked the bike-substitution provision in our own land development regulations, which allows four bike spaces to substitute for one car space. They added 108 bike spaces beyond the 13 required, traded 27 car spaces out, and ended up with a project that better fits how its residents actually live. Parking at Bahama Village is also tied to a pass program based on actual car ownership. If you have a car, you can get a pass. If you sell your car, you turn the pass back in. Households without cars don’t take parking spots they don’t need.

That’s the playbook. Trumbo had the same provision in the same code available to it. The conversation never happened publicly. We knew how to do this. We just didn’t.

The bike count is unclear. As best as can be read from the architectural plans in the public package, the two ground-floor bike rooms together might be able to hold somewhere in the range of 70 to 90 bikes. Plans also show smaller upper-floor rooms labeled “BIKE STORAGE” on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th floors near the elevators. Whether residents are actually expected to lug bikes up and down four flights or use the passenger elevators with their bikes is unclear. Most multifamily buildings prohibit bikes in elevators. The Development Review Committee asked for a published count and rack style during review. That documentation has not surfaced in the public file.

No exterior visitor racks. We don’t see scooter parking either. No e-bike or scooter charging shown. A 150-unit building needs visitor racks for guests, deliveries, the kids’ friends biking over, the contractor stopping by. And e-bikes are the single biggest car-replacement tool a Key West workforce family has. The infrastructure to charge them is cheap. It should be in.

Lessons from 1.5 miles around the corner

Walk past The Lofts at Bahama Village on a weeknight at seven o’clock. The bike racks are full. Mopeds and scooters mixed in. Adult tricycles. Kids’ tricycles in bright colors. Eskute e-bikes locked next to old beach cruisers. Bikes leaning against the fence because the racks have no room left. Meanwhile, the car parking has open spaces. 

This is the demand signal we should be reading. One hundred and twenty-one bike spaces for 126 units — close to one per unit — isn’t enough. Residents have already shown us what they want. They want to bike, they want their kids to bike, they want their e-bikes and scooters with them, and they want a place to put it all.

The Lofts at Trumbo is going to face the same demand. Probably more, because the bike infrastructure here is indoor and covered, which makes biking even more attractive. The City should be planning for that demand now. The 4-to-1 bike-substitution provision is sitting in our own code, available to use. Trading even 25 of the 70 surplus car spaces would add roughly 100 more bike spaces to the project, leave parking at 1.30 per unit (still above code), and bring the project closer to the Bahama Village ratio that residents have shown still isn’t enough.

While we’re at it: dedicated capacity for e-bikes with charging, dedicated capacity for scooters and mopeds with their own racks, and a real number of exterior visitor racks at both pedestrian entrances. A Bahama Village-style parking-pass system tied to actual car ownership would round it out. Households that go car-free shouldn’t be subsidizing parking they don’t use. And for the cars, are they adding electric charging for those?

None of this requires reopening the Major Development Plan. Bike capacity can be expanded into adjacent podium-parking space if some of those car spaces are substituted out. The exterior racks and charging outlets are line items in construction documents. The conversation is still possible.

Reason 3: The Affordability Promise Hangs On Transit. Right Now, That’s Where It Breaks.

The third reason from the 2022 piece was the affordability dividend — not being car-dependent brings livability costs down for the people who live in the project.

Earlier this month I wrote Housing Plus Transportation: The Affordability Math Nobody’s Doing. The short version: housing is the biggest household expense in America. Transportation is the second biggest. The Center for Neighborhood Technology puts Key West households at 56 percent of income going to housing and transportation combined, and Monroe County at 58 percent. Both jurisdictions score 0 percent “location efficient” on CNT’s index. Transportation alone runs $13,596 a year per household in Key West, $15,209 in Monroe County. Even a paid-off car costs roughly $7,000 a year to operate per Bankrate, and that climbs higher here because we have the highest gas prices in Florida and among the worst auto insurance rates in the country.

The promise of putting workforce housing downtown is that residents could trade a car for a bike, or two cars for one, and that the rent break on the affordability side wouldn’t get quietly undone by the transportation cost on the other side. Build a household around the bike network and the bus and your monthly costs drop by hundreds of dollars. Maybe more.

That’s the promise. Whether it gets delivered depends on transit working.

Right now, it doesn’t.

The Lower Keys Shuttle, which I covered in April in The Lower Keys Shuttle: From Workhorse to Racehorse, currently runs only 10 trips a day in each direction. Buses are 90 to 120 minutes apart. That’s not transit a working household can build a life around. That’s not even a backup option. 

The Duval Loop, which used to circulate every 15 minutes through this neighborhood and would serve The Lofts at Trumbo beautifully, was suspended last December. The proposed North and South Connector fixed routes are still on paper, as I covered in March in Could the Duval Loop and Fixed Routes Be Returning to Key West Streets?. The on-demand Key West Rides service exists but isn’t the kind of dependable show-up-and-go convenience that competes with the car keys hanging by the door.

The Lofts at Trumbo sits on the same block as the Key West Housing Authority’s Lang Milian Apartments — 136 units of public housing that have been on this block since 1942. Together that’s almost 300 households of government-supported affordable housing on one block. The transit case isn’t theoretical. It isn’t just about the new residents coming in. It’s been overdue for the families already here.

When transit doesn’t work and parking is free and ample, driving wins. Every time. Not because residents prefer it. Because the design left them no other rational choice. And that’s the moment the housing + transportation math quietly breaks. The rent break gets eaten back by two cars parked under the building. Even if you’ll never ride the bus yourself, you’ll feel it when the teacher you depend on can’t make the math work and moves out of the Keys.

What’s Still Possible, and Where It Leaves Us

The Major Development Plan is approved. The parking count on paper is locked. But a lot is still in play, and it’s worth fighting for, both for the future Trumbo residents and for the Lang Milian families who’ve been waiting longer.

• The bike-substitution fix is the biggest piece. Use the City’s own provision to trade some of the 70 surplus car spaces for serious bike capacity, with dedicated e-bike charging, scooter and moped racks, and a meaningful number of exterior visitor spaces at both entrances. 
• Open the site to White Street. The site backs up to White Street, where the developer is reportedly negotiating access through the Housing Authority’s property — a deal that would open a second egress at the signalized intersection of Palm/Eaton and White, give residents walking access to the Eaton at White bus stop, and stop funneling all of Trumbo’s car traffic toward Grinnell. The City should be at the table making sure that happens.
• Bus stop improvements baked in, not chased three years later. The City has been working on grant applications for upgraded shelters at Old Town stops. The stops nearest The Lofts at Trumbo and Lang Milian should be on that list, with shelter, seating, lighting, and the kind of design that signals these are real transit stops. 
• A resident transit pass program — standard practice in cities like Arlington, Cambridge, Boulder, and Eugene and hundreds more across the country — built into the operating agreement so every household gets a free pass or two. 
• Trumbo Road redesign as the obvious next candidate for the kind of resiliency treatment the City just authorized for Flagler Avenue. There are no sidewalks on Trumbo. None! There’s not bike lane either. Fix this before people move in.
• And the biggest one: bring back the Duval Loop, introduce the proposed North and South Connectors, and fund real frequency and span of service on the Lower Keys Shuttle and all the routes. Without service, infrastructure is decoration. The Loop on 15-minute headways through this neighborhood does more for the affordability of The Lofts at Trumbo and Lang Milian than almost any other single thing the City could do.

The Lofts at Trumbo is a real win. One hundred and fifty workforce families moving into downtown, on a site that’s been dilapidated as long as I’ve lived here. That matters. It matters in itself and it matters for what it says about whether we can keep doing this. The bones of the design are mostly right. The location is right. What we still choose to do — the bike capacity, the transit service, the White Street deal, and putting sidewalks on Trumbo is what determines whether the families coming soon can afford to stay here, and whether the next project gets it righter than this one did.

We just got a win for workers and a win for downtown. Now let’s make sure we finish the project in a way that the new residents can really afford to live in it by reducing their car dependence. That will contribute the final win. And everyone in Key West will be better for it.

# # # 

Chris Hamilton is the founder of Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown, a local advocacy group championing sustainable mobility and vibrant public spaces. Subscribe to the blog and follow on Facebook, Twitter, and Substack for updates. All stories are cross posted at KONK Life News. Originally from Washington, D.C., Chris spent over two decades leading nationally acclaimed initiatives in transit, biking, walking, and smart growth for Arlington County, VA’s DOT. Since moving to Key West in 2015, he has embraced a car-free lifestyle downtown, dedicating his time to non-profits and community projects. Explore all Streets for People column articles here.

Housing Plus Transportation: The Affordability Math Nobody’s Doing

Posted on May 2, 2026     Leave a Comment

Why the second-biggest bill in your household budget is the affordability lever our local governments can actually pull

Streets for People  |  Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown  |  Chris Hamilton  |  May 2, 2026

Everyone’s talking about affordability. Your groceries. Your car insurance. The gas pump on Truman Avenue at $4.79 a gallon. The rent that just went up again. The cost of a sandwich at a place that used to be a $9 sandwich. The cost of actually living here. National polls heading into the 2026 elections show cost of living as the top voter concern by a mile — across parties, across age groups, across regions. It was the issue that decided 2024, and it’s already shaping 2026.

Here at home, the same conversation is everywhere. Hometown! Key West, the Key West Chamber and others will start running its candidate forums in the months ahead, and every candidate — for mayor, for the three open City Commission seats, for the two County Commission seats on the August ballot — is going to say some version of the same thing. Keep Key West affordable. Support working families. Protect our workforce. They’re right to. In Key West, the average apartment rent now runs about $2,548 a month — 56% above the national average. The average wage-earner can’t afford the average rent. That’s why the word affordable is on every campaign website.

But there’s a piece of the affordability conversation that almost never gets its own microphone — and it shows up in plain numbers. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American household spends $1,110 a month on transportation. That’s $13,318 a year. That’s the second-biggest household expense in the country, right after housing. Together, housing and transportation eat up more than half of what the typical family spends in a year. And in Key West and the Florida Keys that percentage is even higher – and we’ll get to that in a moment.

Here’s the part worth sitting with. Unlike housing — most of the price tag of which is driven by forces no commissioner can easily control — transportation costs are something local government can actually move the needle on. This summer. In the FY27 budget. With decisions the people we’re about to elect will vote on in their first year. In our story below let’s look at the affordability math equation, how public transit and bikes fit in, and how the City of Key West and Monroe County can address the problem this summer. We even have some questions you can ask the candidates. Let’s dive in…

The Real Affordability Math

Start with the national picture. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2024 Consumer Expenditure Survey, released last December, lays it out cleanly. The average U.S. household spends $26,266 a year on housing — about a third of total spending. Transportation runs $13,318 — another 17%. Together that’s more than half the household budget, gone before you’ve paid for groceries (12.9%), child care, or health insurance. The transportation share has been climbing fast: insurance costs alone are up roughly 25% in the past three years.

AAA’s 2025 Your Driving Costs study puts the average annual cost of owning and operating a new vehicle at $11,577 — about $965 a month. Two adults each with a car — close to the average household in both Key West (1.7 cars) and Monroe County (1.9) easily run $20,000 a year in transportation costs before they think about rent. 

And before anyone says but my car is paid off — about half of all U.S. drivers own their car outright — that doesn’t get you off the hook. Bankrate’s hidden-cost-of-ownership study puts the cost of running a paid-off car at roughly $7,000 a year — about $580 a month. That’s gas, insurance, maintenance, registration, depreciation, and the thousand dollars you weren’t planning to spend on new tires. In the Florida Keys, where insurance and gas push higher, that number climbs further.

Florida insurance is among the worst in the nation — full coverage averages roughly 60% above the national average, putting Florida third highest in the country depending on which study you read. Monroe County, in turn, has consistently posted the highest gas prices in Florida. I photographed Truman Avenue a couple weeks ago with the price per gallon at $4.79. The price hasn’t budged. And while it can be slightly cheaper up the Keys, when our households spend even just the national average on transportation, we’re underspending the local reality.

The Center for Neighborhood Technology has been doing this math for over a decade in their Housing+Transportation Index, which combines both bills into one number to measure true affordability. The national average is around 50%. Key West runs 56%. Monroe County runs 58%. 56 and 58 percent! Both well above the line that affordability planners use to flag a place as cost-burdened.

Look closer at the numbers and the picture sharpens. The CNT model puts Key West’s typical household at 1.7 cars and $13,596 a year in transportation costs. In Monroe County, the same model — same income assumption — shows 1.9 cars and $15,209 in annual transportation costs. The County household drives nearly 22,000 miles a year, compared to 17,000 in the City. CNT scores Monroe and Key West both as “car-dependent with limited access to public transportation” – more on that below. Meaning there are no location efficient neighborhoods in Key West or the Florida Keys that reach the threshold where transportation costs are low enough to genuinely offset housing costs. 

Rent-only affordability is a half-measure. Housing-plus-transportation is the real number. And by that real number, our two jurisdictions both run roughly 57% of household income. Every family that goes from two cars to one saves more money in a year than almost any single affordable-housing policy will generate for that household. That isn’t a rhetorical flourish. It’s just arithmetic. So how do we effect the math?

By making it easy to take the bus and ride bikes. But remember CNT rated both Key West and the rest of the Keys as “car-dependent.” So, if we can fix that…

But taking the bus isn’t so easy anywhere in the Keys, is it?

Why Almost Nobody Rides the Bus — And Why That Can Change

Here’s the number that should stop everyone in their tracks and the reason the CNT says the Keys are “car-dependent.”. According to the U.S. Census, about half of one percent of Monroe County workers — 0.5% — use public transit to get to work. The Key West city number is in the same microscopic neighborhood. Either way, almost nobody rides the bus.

That isn’t proof nobody wants transit. It’s proof the service isn’t good enough to use. You can’t tell your boss you’ll be ninety minutes late because you missed the bus.

The reasons aren’t a mystery — they show up in every conversation locals have about transit. Recent comments on the Friends of Car-Free Key West Facebook page describe the lived reality. Kim, a Key West local, wrote that 90% of bus stops are unmarked, the app is hard to figure out, and you can find yourself standing in the wrong spot watching the bus pull away on the other side of the highway. She’d happily sell both her cars and rely on transit, she said, if the system were actually catchable. Shannon, who lives up the Keys, said she’d ride from Big Pine if the bus ran frequently and matched her work hours. Eric figured out he was effectively earning $50 an hour by riding — but only if you have the time to spend waiting. None of these are anti-transit voices. They’re frustrated would-be riders.

And the latent demand shows up in the ridership numbers despite the lousy service. The Lower Keys Shuttle carried 97,522 rides last fiscal year — on 90-to-120-minute headways. The Workforce Express moved 18,399 people on just six trips each way between Stock Island and Bahama Village in a year, and Monroe County contributed nothing to it. The Duval Loop carried more than a million rides over its life before being suspended last fall. People aren’t avoiding the bus because they love paying car insurance. They’re avoiding it because of lack of frequency, limited span of service, non-existent communications and unpredictable apps in the case of on-demand. It’s awful.

There Are Plans To Make Transit Better – We Just Have to Fund Them

The good news is we don’t have to invent the answer. The City has been doing the planning work for years. A quick tour of what’s already on paper:

The Lower Keys Shuttle — Marathon to Key West and back, the spine of regional transit in the Lower Keys. I wrote about it two weeks ago: the workhorse that, with 30-minute frequency and span of service into the late evening, becomes a racehorse. The City’s updated 10-Year Transit Development Plan calls for exactly that.

The Duval Loop — the free downtown circulator, suspended December 31. The same updated plan shows it returning under multiple FY27 scenarios.

The Workforce Express — Stock Island to Bahama Village, a quiet workhorse that moves working people to working jobs, but with just six trips daily in each direction needs a lot more frequency and a simpler route to be useful. Operated by the City, used by County residents, funded by neither at anything close to the level the demand justifies.

Two new fixed routes — a North Connector running through New Town from the airport, and a South Connector linking the 3900 South Roosevelt Avenue housing complexes to downtown. Both are in the March 2026 update of the plan, slated for possible FY27 launch.

Key West Rides — the City’s existing on-demand service, which fills gaps in places fixed routes can’t reach. Not a substitute for frequency, but a useful complement.

None of this is speculative. It’s all in adopted, published plans. The planning work is done. What’s missing is the funding — and the political decision to treat transit as the affordability tool it is.

And Then There Are the Bikes

The locals already know. Two of the comments on that Facebook thread came from neighbors saying — politely or otherwise — you’ve heard of a bicycle, right? They’re right. Key West and Stock Island are four miles by two miles, flat as a pancake, warm year-round. PeopleforBikes ranked Key West the #1 biking city in Florida and one of the top 50 in North America for two years running. For getting around the island, the bicycle is — already, today — a real option for most people who live and work here. The Census says 13 – 15% of residents already do. 

And the e-bike changes the conversation entirely. Electric assist takes the sweat, the hills (well, the bridges), and the distance objections off the table. An older resident who hasn’t been on a bike in twenty years can ride one. A nurse finishing a 12-hour shift at LKMC can get home to Bahama Village without arriving exhausted. A worker on Stock Island can commute to a downtown hotel in less than fifteen minutes without a parking hassle. On Key West and Stock Island, the e-bike is the affordability multiplier the rest of America doesn’t have. Most cities can only dream of geography this friendly to two wheels.

Up the Keys, the bike’s role shifts. There, the bicycle is the first-and-last-mile partner to the bus. The Lower Keys Shuttle now has three bike racks per bus that fit wider tires. The City has invested in bike racks at every bus stop, fix-it stations, and lighting along the corridor. A worker in Big Pine bikes five minutes to the shuttle stop, racks the bike, rides into Key West, reverses the trip at the end of the day. That’s a real commute, available today, and it gets dramatically more useful when the bus comes every 30 minutes instead of every 90-120.

Budgets Are Where Priorities Show Up

Here’s where this gets concrete. The City of Key West has four strategic priorities, as City staff repeatedly emphasized at the January 27 parking garage workshop: infrastructure, affordable housing, sustainability and environmental adaptation, and financial stability. (The City’s website still lists a slightly older 2024–25 set — but in both versions, affordable housing is one of the priorities.) Rightly. It belongs there.

What’s not on the list: transportation. That’s the structural problem. The City’s own strategic plan recognizes that affordable housing matters. It hasn’t yet recognized that affordable transportation is the other half of the same equation — the half BLS data tells us is $1,110 a month per household.

And yet transportation is very much a City function. Key West Transit operates the Duval Loop, the Workforce Express, the Lower Keys Shuttle, and Key West Rides. The City has an excellent, recently updated 10-Year Transit Development Plan. It has an adopted Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan. It has a just-adopted Safety Action Plan with 36 projects and a price tag. The planning is done. The shelf is full.

At the County, the story is harder. Monroe County had a regional transit vision once — a 30-minute frequency service running the full length of the Keys, championed by the transit director the County hired and pushed by Commissioner David Rice. Last summer, the County dismantled its transit department. Budgets say more about priorities than speeches do. 

What happened last summer, at the County and City, was a priority statement.

This summer is a new budget cycle, and the choice will look different. County Administrator Christine Hurley has signaled her office plans to bring Lower Keys Shuttle and Workforce Express improvement proposals to the BOCC, if other budget pressures don’t crowd them out. On the City side, the Transit Development Plan update lays out three FY27 scenarios — ranging from restoring just the Duval Loop (a roughly $150,000 gap in a $160 million general fund) to the full three-route build-out (a $1.6 million gap). The funding tools to close that gap don’t require new resident taxes. Parking revenue, cruise disembarkation fees, a TDC partnership, and the Tourist Development Tax for tourist-serving transit are all already on the table. They’ve been on the table for years.

Some of the leadership on this is already in place. Commissioner Sam Kaufman has been the most consistent transit and bike vote on the City Commission for years. Commissioner Monica Haskell has driven the TDT-for-tourist-transit argument. Commissioners David Rice and Michelle Lincoln on the County side have been responsive to questions about regional transit. Every candidate who is on the August ballot — for mayor, for the three open City Commission seats, for the two County Commission seats — has the chance to pick up the thread and make the connection on affordability to support for public transit and safer streets for bicycling. 

Worth Asking at the Forums

These aren’t trick questions. They aren’t partisan. They’re the missing half of the affordability conversation the candidates are already having.

When a candidate says affordability, here are four questions that bring the rest of the family budget into the conversation:

1. Does your definition of affordability include transportation — the second-biggest bill most Keys families pay?
2. Will you fund the transit improvements in the 2026 Transit Development Plan update — restoring the Duval Loop, launching the new North and South Connector routes, and improving frequency on the Lower Keys Shuttle and Workforce Express?
3. For County candidates: will you support real Monroe County investment in the Lower Keys Shuttle and Workforce Express — routes that primarily serve County residents working Key West jobs?
4. Will you fund the adopted Bike/Ped Master Plan and Safety Action Plan so families that want to go car-lite or car-free can actually do so safely?

Four questions. The answers to them — and the budget votes that follow — will tell you more about a candidate’s commitment to affordability than any campaign tagline ever can.

Keep the Keys the Keys

Come back to where we started. Everyone is talking about affordability — at the gas pump, the grocery line, the kitchen table. National polls say it. Hometown! Key West forums are about to confirm it. The City’s strategic plan names it. Every candidate’s website mentions it.

Keep Key West Key West. Keep the Keys the Keys. Both phrases mean the same thing in the end: keep Keys people in the Keys. The cook in Big Pine. The teacher on Sugarloaf. The nurse on Stock Island. The fourth-generation Conch in Bahama Village. The young couple just trying to stay through one more year.

You can’t keep the Keys the Keys if Keys people can’t afford to live here. And you can’t solve the affordability crisis if you’re only solving half of it.

And if you’re reading this thinking this isn’t about me, I’ll never ride a bus — fair enough. But you’ll feel it when it’s gone. You’ll feel it when your favorite restaurant can’t keep a line cook because they couldn’t afford to keep their second car running. You’ll feel it when the school can’t hire a teacher who can’t make the math work. You’ll feel it when the nurse who took care of your mother on the third floor at LKMC moves to Homestead. The transportation half of the affordability equation is what keeps the people who make this place the Keys here in the Keys. We all have a stake in it.

Housing is one half. Transportation is the other. The plans are on the shelf. The budget decisions are coming this summer. The candidates are already talking about affordability. We just need them — and us — to do the whole math.

Budgets say more about priorities than speeches do.

# # #

Chris Hamilton is the founder of Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown, a local advocacy group championing sustainable mobility and vibrant public spaces. Subscribe to the blog and follow on Facebook, Twitter, and Substack for updates. All stories are cross posted at KONK Life News. Originally from Washington, D.C., Chris spent over two decades leading nationally acclaimed initiatives in transit, biking, walking, and smart growth for Arlington County, VA’s DOT. Since moving to Key West in 2015, he has embraced a car-free lifestyle downtown, dedicating his time to non-profits and community projects. Explore all Streets for People column articles here.

The Lower Keys Shuttle: From Workhorse to Racehorse

Posted on April 18, 2026     3 Comments

One road. Fifty miles. The case for transforming the Keys’ most important bus into a transit spine worthy of the place.

Streets for People  |  Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown  |  Chris Hamilton  |  April 18, 2026

Two weeks ago, on an evening walk along Truman Avenue, I stopped to take a couple of photos. Circle K: $4.59 a gallon for unleaded. Chevron across the street: $4.49. These weren’t anomalies — when I walked by again this week, the prices had gone up. Monroe County consistently has the highest gas prices in Florida, and right now, with global oil markets in turmoil, those prices are punishing anyone who has no choice but to drive to work.

And in the Florida Keys, almost everyone who works here has no choice but to drive.

Think about what that means for a worker commuting from Marathon to Key West — about 50 miles each way, roughly 100 miles round trip every day. At $4.59 a gallon in a car getting 25 miles per gallon, that’s $300 to $400 a month just in fuel. Even someone coming from Big Pine Key, just 30 miles away, is spending well over $200 a month just in fuel. And that assumes a reasonably fuel-efficient vehicle. For someone driving an older truck or van, the number climbs higher still. Add Florida’s now-notorious auto insurance rates — the highest in the nation — a car payment, maintenance, and downtown parking, and you’re looking at a transportation burden that can easily exceed $800 to $1,000 a month. On top of Keys housing costs. On top of everything else.

Now consider this: a monthly Keys pass on the Lower Keys Shuttle costs $75.

That gap — between what it costs to drive and what it could cost to ride — is the story of the Lower Keys Shuttle in a single number. The bus is there. The route is there. The need is there. What’s missing is the frequency, the span of service, and the political will to make it something people can actually depend on.

But right now, for the first time in years, that political will may actually be within reach. This summer, Monroe County and the City of Key West have a chance to transform the Lower Keys Shuttle from the everyday workhorse bus it is into the racehorse transit spine the Keys has always needed — frequent enough to be useful, late enough to serve the people who keep this island running, good enough to make a tourist put down the car keys. This is that story.

The Workhorse

The Lower Keys Shuttle is the quiet backbone of Key West Transit. While the Duval Loop grabbed headlines when it was suspended in January — and rightly so — the LKS has been doing its job steadily and without fanfare for years. Ten trips a day from Marathon to Key West. Ten trips back. Every day since the mid-2000’s without change.

Ridership has been remarkably consistent: more than 96,000 rides in FY2022-23, over 100,000 in FY2023-24, and on pace again this year — averaging roughly 7,500 to 7,800 riders a month in the fall and winter months. The service held up through COVID better than almost any other route in the system. It is, in every practical sense, the one transit lifeline connecting the workforce corridor of the Lower Keys to the jobs, services, and economic engine of downtown Key West.

And over the past several years, the City of Key West has made real investments in that lifeline — just not in frequency. New bus shelters, benches, bike racks at the stops and new additional and wider bike racks on the buses, lighting, and map and schedule signage have been installed at stops from Marathon to Key West, making it genuinely easier to bike to the shuttle and complete that first and last mile of the journey. It’s good work and it deserves credit. But you can have the nicest bus stops in South Florida and if the next bus isn’t coming for 90 or even 120 minutes, most workers simply can’t risk it.

That’s where we’ve been stuck for a decades. The infrastructure got better. The schedule didn’t.

One Road. One Opportunity.

Here’s something that transit planners in most American cities would find almost impossible to believe: the Lower Keys Shuttle serves a corridor where every single destination — every hotel, every restaurant, every shop, every job, every home — sits on or within a short walk or bike ride of a single road.

US Route 1. The Overseas Highway. There is no other road.

In most cities, the fundamental challenge of public transit is coverage. How do you put a bus stop reasonably close to where people live, work, eat, and shop when those origins and destinations are spread across a grid of hundreds of streets? You can’t. You make tradeoffs, you serve the densest corridors, and you accept that a lot of people will never be close enough to a stop to make transit practical. The Lower Keys don’t have that problem. You need one really good route, running frequently, for a long span of the day.

Think of it like a subway trunk line. The A train in New York, the Orange Line in DC — these are the arteries that everything else connects to. They work because they’re frequent enough that you don’t need to check a schedule. You just show up and a train comes. The Lower Keys Shuttle could be that for this community. The geography is practically begging for it. One road. No transfers needed. No coverage problem to solve.

What would that look like in practice? A bus every 30 minutes from early morning until midnight — or later, for the hospitality workers whose shifts end well after the current last departure from downtown at 7:49pm. Round trip for a month: $75 with a Keys pass, $45 if you qualify for reduced fare. For workers, for residents, for tourists stuck in the grinding traffic that US-1 serves up every winter season — a frequent, reliable shuttle along that single corridor would be genuinely transformative.

Three Audiences. One Bus.

Here’s what’s easy to miss when we talk about the Lower Keys Shuttle: we tend to frame it as a service for workers, as if tourists and residents are separate conversations. But on US-1, those three groups are riding the same road, stuck in the same traffic, heading to the same downtown. The case for a better shuttle isn’t three separate arguments. It’s one argument with three faces.

Start with the workers, because the numbers are the most damning. According to the US Census, less than half of one percent of Monroe County residents use public transit to get to work. Half. Of. One. Percent. That’s not an indication of demand — workers aren’t choosing their cars because they love sitting on US-1 at 8am. They’re choosing their cars because 90 to 120 minutes between buses makes the shuttle functionally unusable for anyone with a shift that starts at a specific time. As I’ve written before, you can’t tell your boss you might be an hour and a half late because you missed the bus.

And the cost of that forced car ownership lands hardest on exactly the people who can least afford it. We’ve documented that here. What if each adult in a family didn’t have to own a car to get to work? They could save $1,000 a month according to AAA. A monthly Keys pass on the Lower Keys Shuttle costs $75. The math is not subtle.

The business community should be paying attention to this too, and the smart ones — like Paul Menta of Shop Mom and Pop Key West — already are. A restaurant or hotel in Key West that can tell a prospective employee in Big Pine Key or Summerland Key that there’s a reliable, frequent bus — one that comes every 30 minutes and runs past midnight — has something to offer that no competitor up the Keys does. Right now, the pitch to any worker who doesn’t own a car or can’t afford to drive is essentially: sorry, you can’t work here. That’s not a transit problem. That’s a recruiting problem.

Then there are the residents — the people who live up the Keys, not necessarily for work, but who have built their lives in Big Pine Key or Cudjoe or Sugarloaf and need to get to Key West for medical appointments, grocery runs, government offices, family. For these residents, the LKS is a lifeline or it’s nothing, depending entirely on whether the schedule works for them. At current frequency, for many it’s nothing. A retired couple in Big Coppitt who doesn’t want to maintain two cars — or can’t — has essentially no transit option that works for anything resembling a normal errand.

And then there are the visitors — who may be the most underappreciated audience of all. We tend to imagine tourists as people happily tooling around in rental cars, at least up the Keys. But talk to anyone staying at a resort on Summerland Key or a vacation rental in Big Pine and the reality is different. They arrived by car — the overwhelming majority of Monroe County visitors do — and now they’re dependent on that car for absolutely everything. Dinner requires driving. A sunset drink on the water requires driving. A morning fishing charter, a trip to the grocery store, a lazy afternoon on Duval Street — all of it means getting back in the car, finding parking, and navigating US-1. Which at 6pm, when every Keys worker is heading home and every tourist is heading out for dinner, is nobody’s idea of a relaxing vacation.

A frequent, reliable shuttle along US-1 — running from Marathon through every key into downtown, every 30 minutes, until well after midnight — would change that calculation entirely. You wouldn’t even have to call it a commuter bus. Brand it for visitors. Put a conch shell on the side. Call it the Keys Explorer. Workers and residents will figure it out, and the Tourist Development Tax dollars that currently fund zero transit would finally be doing what they were always supposed to do: serving tourists. Every city that has built a thriving tourist economy on a walkable, transit-connected downtown knows that people spend more money when they’re not worried about driving back. They stay longer, stop at more places, come back sooner. The Lower Keys Shuttle, done right, isn’t a cost to tourism. It’s an investment in it.

Follow the Money

Here’s a number worth sitting with: the Lower Keys Shuttle costs roughly $1.56 million a year to operate. Monroe County — the government that represents every single person living in the Keys from Key Largo to Key West — contributes about $332,000 of that. The City of Marathon chips in about $190,000. The City of Key West covers the rest. That’s over a million dollars annually from Key West’s budget for a route that runs 50 miles up someone else’s highway, serving workers, residents, and tourists spread across the entire Lower Keys corridor.

To be clear: Key West isn’t complaining, at least not publicly. The City has been a faithful steward of this route for years. But the funding math raises a legitimate question. If the Lower Keys Shuttle serves the whole region — and it does, visibly and measurably — why is one municipality carrying the majority of the cost while the County and its other cities benefit?

The County’s contribution for operations works out to roughly 21 cents of every dollar spent on the LKS. And the County spends zero for capital. For a service that is, in every practical sense, a regional lifeline, that’s a thin slice. And it becomes thinner still when you consider what the County does spend on tourism promotion. Monroe County’s TDC took in $61.5 million in Tourist Development Tax revenue in FY2024, and their recently-released FY2025 Annual Report celebrates a record 4.7 million domestic visitors — up 4% year over year. The TDC employs 29 people across marketing, advertising, PR, sales and technology. They spent nearly $10 million on capital projects and nonprofits and $3 million on events. Somewhere between $30 and $40 million goes to marketing campaigns — ads, streaming audio, influencer trips, and media missions. The amount directed to transit, specifically to the Lower Keys Shuttle those 4.7 million visitors might ride once they get here? Zero. The 37-page FY2025 Annual Report does not mention transit once. Not a word. Couldn’t some of this be spent on tourist serving buses and their operation?

This isn’t a new argument. I’ve been making it for years, most recently here and here, and so have others. Florida Statute §125.0104 allows Tourist Development Tax funds to be used for transportation serving tourists. The LKS serves tourists — we just established that in the previous section at some length. The legal pathway exists. What has been missing is the political will to walk through it.

The Window Is Open

There’s a version of this story where nothing changes. The County’s FY27 budget gets consumed by the property tax fight, the LKS funding conversation gets deferred again, and we’re writing the same article in 2028. That version is entirely possible and frankly not hard to imagine.

But there’s another version, and the signals in recent weeks suggest it’s genuinely within reach.

Christine Hurley, the Monroe County Administrator, confirmed recently that her office has been meeting with Key West staff about the Lower Keys Shuttle and that a recommendation could make it into the FY27 budget process. That’s not a press release. That’s an administrator who has done her homework telling you the machinery is moving. On the City side, Assistant City Manager Rod Delostrinos and the transit team have been working through funding alternatives and exploring new revenue streams — cruise ship disembarkation fees, parking revenues, potential TDC partnership — to restore and expand transit services. Commissioner Sam Kaufman, one of the most vocal transit advocates on the City Commission, has been pushing this conversation from inside City Hall, and Commissioner Monica Haskell has been working with TDC Executive Director Kara Franker on the tourism funding angle.

The pieces are in place in a way they haven’t been before. The question is whether the political will matches the moment.

What would meaningful improvement actually look like? The Key West Transit Ten-Year Plan — updated just last month — gives us a framework. The plan calls for increased frequency on the LKS, extended evening service, and better connections between the shuttle and local Key West routes. These aren’t moonshots. They’re the kinds of service improvements that transit agencies around the country implement when they decide a corridor is worth investing in. The Lower Keys corridor, with its single road and captive ridership potential, is one of the most investable transit corridors in Florida. You don’t need to build anything. The road is there. The buses are there. The stops — freshly upgraded with shelters, benches, bike racks, and real-time info on the app — are there. What’s needed is frequency and span, and frequency and span cost money.

Here’s a useful comparison. Arlington, Virginia — where I spent more than two decades working in transportation before moving to Key West — built a nationally recognized transit and commuter services program on the back of exactly this kind of corridor thinking. The Rosslyn-Ballston corridor is one road, essentially, lined with offices, apartments, restaurants, and hotels. When they decided to invest in frequent, reliable transit along that corridor, ridership followed. Businesses followed. Workers who didn’t own cars could suddenly live and work there. The corridor became one of the most economically productive in the Washington region. The investment paid for itself many times over.

The Lower Keys aren’t Arlington. The scale is different, the density is different, the politics are different. But the underlying logic is identical: a single well-served corridor, where everyone’s origin and destination is already on the line, is the easiest case for transit investment you will ever find. You don’t get many of those. When you have one, you invest in it.

And here’s the bigger dream, while we’re at it. The Lower Keys Shuttle doesn’t have to stop at Marathon. Richard Clark, the transit director the County let go last summer when it dismantled its fledgling transit department, used to talk about a 30-minute frequency service running the entire length of the Keys, all the way to Key Largo and beyond. A true regional rapid bus corridor along the Overseas Highway. That vision didn’t die with his departure. It just needs someone to pick it back up. Start with the Lower Keys. Prove the model. Then build north.

The FY27 budget process begins this summer. The decisions made in the next few months will determine whether the Lower Keys Shuttle stays exactly what it is — a reliable, underloved workhorse running on a decades-old schedule — or becomes something closer to what this corridor has always deserved. A real transit spine for the Lower Keys. Frequent enough to be useful. Late enough to serve the workers who keep this island running. Good enough to make a tourist put down the car keys.

Imagine It.

Picture it. Not as a policy outcome. As a Tuesday morning, January 2027.

A teacher in Big Pine Key finishes breakfast, grabs her bag, and walks to the stop. She doesn’t check the schedule because she doesn’t need to — the bus comes every 30 minutes. She knows that. Everyone knows that. She rides in, reads her phone, watches the water slide past on both sides of the Seven Mile Bridge, and gets to work without having touched a steering wheel.

A couple staying at a resort on Summerland Key decides on a whim to spend the afternoon in Key West. No discussion about parking. No designated driver negotiation over dinner. They just go. They stay later than they planned because they can. They spend more money because they’re relaxed. They tell their friends about it when they get home.

A line cook finishing a late shift on Duval Street catches the 11:30 bus north. He’s home by midnight. He’s not calculating whether he can afford the gas this week or texting someone for a ride. He’s just going home.

This is what frequent, reliable transit does. It doesn’t just solve a transportation problem. It quietly stitches a community together — the same way the Metro stitched Washington together, gave it a connective tissue that turned a collection of neighborhoods into something that felt like a shared city. The Lower Keys are already connected by one road and one extraordinary landscape. All they’re missing is a bus worthy of both.

I walked past those gas stations on Truman Avenue again the other night. The prices had barely moved.

Somewhere up US-1, a cook finishing a dinner shift in Key West was trying to figure out whether to wait for the last bus or call someone for a ride. A housekeeper in Big Pine Key was calculating whether this month’s gas bill was going to make rent tight. A family on vacation in Summerland Key was arguing about who had to be the designated driver so they could finally go have a nice dinner in Old Town.

None of these people are asking for anything unreasonable. They want to get where they’re going reliably, affordably, without the whole exercise feeling like a punishment. That’s not a radical vision of transportation. That’s just a bus that comes often enough to be useful.

The Lower Keys Shuttle has been that bus for a lot of people for a long time — quietly, steadily, without much fanfare. It has hauled workers and retirees and tourists and students up and down 50 miles of the most beautiful highway in America, ten times a day, every day, for years. It deserves better than the schedule it’s been running since the early days of the Obama administration.

The County is at the table. The City is at the table. The funding mechanisms exist. The political moment, fragile as it always is, is here.

The workhorse has earned its chance to run like a racehorse. All it needs now is for the people making the budget decisions this summer to decide that this is the investment worth making.

It is.

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Chris Hamilton is the founder of Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown, a local advocacy group championing sustainable mobility and vibrant public spaces. Subscribe to the blog and follow on Facebook, Twitter, and Substack for updates. All stories are cross posted at KONK Life News. Originally from Washington, D.C., Chris spent over two decades leading nationally acclaimed initiatives in transit, biking, walking, and smart growth for Arlington County, VA’s DOT. Since moving to Key West in 2015, he has embraced a car-free lifestyle downtown, dedicating his time to non-profits and community projects. Explore all Streets for People column articles here.

Keeping Key West Key West — and It Starts at the Airport 

Posted on March 28, 2026     Leave a Comment

Why record airport growth is good news for everything that makes this island irreplaceable.

Streets for People  |  Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown  |  Chris Hamilton  |  March 28, 2026

Key West International Airport recently announced “Another Month, Another Milestone” with their busiest February on record — a 9.4% increase in passengers for the month year over year. With 306,904 passengers using the airport in the first two months of 2026, that’s a 6.5% increase over the same period in 2025. And consider they did 734,150 passengers in all of 2025 — up 2.2% from the previous year. We noticed the reaction on social media was mixed. Some saw it as bad news: more tourists, more crowding, more strain on infrastructure. They’re wrong. Here’s why.

At recent candidate forums across Key West, many candidates keep coming back to something along the lines of “keeping Key West Key West” — preserving the quirky, local-focused, One Human Family character that makes this place special. But that vision requires the right economic foundation. And increasingly, that foundation depends on visitors who choose Key West intentionally, not tourists passing through on a Keys road trip who spend their weekend in a hotel room with a cooler full of beer they brought from home.

In our story below we’ll explore what the airport numbers actually tell us, why the visitors flying directly into Key West are different from other tourists, what that means for our golden goose that drives our economy — our historic downtown — and what we should be doing to build on this trend.

The Shift Is Real — But the Cars Are Still Coming

Let’s start with some perspective. In 2025, 23,250 vehicles crossed into Key West every day on the Overseas Highway — the last segment before the Cheryl Cates Memorial (Cow Key) Bridge, and the only road onto our island. Roughly half of the 46,500 total daily count recorded at the Cow Key Bridge, which measures traffic in both directions. That’s back to about the peak levels of 2022, when Key West enjoyed a post-COVID tourism boom as international destinations remained out of reach for many travelers. It dipped in 2023, recovered, and now it’s back. Not a runaway increase — but a clear reminder that the pressure on our streets and parking isn’t going away anytime soon.

We don’t have a precise breakdown of how many of those vehicles belong to residents, workers, delivery trucks, and service vehicles versus visitors. That data isn’t publicly reported at the Key West level, and it’s a gap worth noting. But we know Key West has roughly 25,000 residents. We know we host over two million overnight visitors a year. And we know from the TDC’s own 2024 Visitor Profile Study that the vast majority of those overnight visitors still arrive in a car — one way or another.

Consider: add up every category of visitor who arrives in a car — those who drove their personal vehicle, those who flew into Miami or another Florida airport and rented one, and those who rented from outside the state — and you get nearly 74% of all overnight visitors arriving in a vehicle that needs somewhere to park. In our 2021 article we cited 77% arriving by car — so the number has improved modestly. But cars remain by far the dominant way people get to Key West.

Do the rough math and the picture sharpens: even conservatively, hundreds of thousands of visitor vehicles cross that bridge every year, competing for roughly 10,000 parking spaces downtown, circling our residential streets, and adding to the congestion on our one road in and out. And research says, once they arrive here by car, they are more inclined to use it to get around.

So what is “the shift” we’re talking about? It’s not that cars have suddenly disappeared from our streets — clearly they haven’t. It’s that the mix is slowly, meaningfully changing. Direct flights into Key West have grown alongside airport expansion. The road into Key West is at capacity. So the growth we want to see isn’t on the highway — it’s in the air. And increasingly, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Why Airport Visitors Are Different

Airport visitors behave differently than drive-up tourists — and the data proves it.

According to a 2021 economic analysis of airport visitors by Rockport Analytics, visitors arriving at Key West International Airport spend an average of $99.45 per day — 44% more than the $68.95 average for all Florida Keys visitors. They also stay longer — 5.3 nights on average compared to 4.3 nights for non-airport travelers. That extra night matters. It means one more day eating in our restaurants, visiting our attractions, and spending money in our local economy. They spend significantly more on entertainment and recreation, dining, and retail. Perhaps more importantly, 67% of airport arrivals don’t use a vehicle during their stay, and 90% stay in Key West proper rather than spreading out across the Keys.

Here’s what that looks like from ground level. From our balcony overlooking several Key West hotels, we constantly see the difference. Visitors who drive here frequently arrive with coolers, cases of beer, and bags of groceries — provisioning for a weekend where they’ll spend as little as possible in local businesses. They need street parking. They add to traffic congestion. And when they leave, local restaurants, bars, and shops haven’t seen much of their money.

Airport visitors can’t do that. They arrive with luggage, not coolers. They eat in our restaurants because they have no kitchen. They explore downtown on foot because they don’t have a car. And they spend significantly more money while they’re here.

Increasingly, the data shows that’s exactly what visitors are coming for. The Monroe County TDC’s 2024 Visitor Profile Study shows a remarkable shift in what tourists are doing here. Bar visits dropped 8 percentage points from the prior year. Meanwhile, sightseeing and attractions climbed 5 points, wildlife viewing jumped 10 points, and museum visits and cultural events both increased. Visitors are choosing Key West for what makes it unique — the arts, the culture, the history, the natural environment — not just for another beach-and-bar experience they could find anywhere.

The Golden Goose Needs Engaged Visitors

Historic downtown Key West — Duval Street, the Historic Seaport, our museums and galleries, our festivals, music venues and cultural institutions — is the economic engine that makes everything else work. It’s what we call the golden goose.

The golden goose needs visitors who walk Duval Street and stop in local shops. Who eat at locally-owned restaurants. Who attend performances at the Waterfront Playhouse and Red Barn Theatre. Who visit the Key West Art & Historical Society’s Custom House Museum and attend an opening at The Studios of Key West. Who are on the hunt for live music and art. Who spend money that circulates through the local economy and supports local jobs.

These are visitors who navigate our narrow historic streets on foot or by bike, who discover a tucked-away gallery or a neighborhood restaurant precisely because they’re not driving past it. The human scale of our downtown — the thing that makes Key West feel like Key West and not like anywhere else — is exactly what airport visitors are coming here to experience.

And that’s the deeper point. The tourists we attract don’t just affect what’s in our cash registers today — they shape what Key West becomes over time. A visitor economy built around engaged, intentional tourists supports arts funding, cultural institutions, and the unique festivals and events that define us. One built around pass-through traffic supports parking garages, chain bars and t-shirt shops. The economics follow the visitors.

At a time when the State of Florida is actively working to erase what makes Key West unique — most recently with legislation that, as Linda Grist Cunningham wrote in Key West Island News, threatens to upend the inclusive festivals and events that power our tourist economy — our best defense is economic. Goombay, Fantasy Fest, Womenfest, Pride Month — these aren’t just celebrations of who we are. They’re what people fly here for. Protecting them is protecting the golden goose.

More airport passengers — more visitors who chose this place specifically, who came for what makes us irreplaceable — tilts the economics in that direction. That’s not a small thing.

The Bonus: Less Pressure on Streets and Parking

There’s a transportation benefit to all of this too, and for those of us who have been making the case for a more walkable, bikeable Key West, it’s worth spelling out.

More airport visitors means proportionally fewer cars competing for parking on residential streets, fewer vehicles circling downtown looking for spaces, less pressure on our already-strained parking infrastructure. Highway traffic is back to peak 2022 levels while the airport posts record passenger numbers — more visitors overall, but the growth is increasingly arriving by air rather than by car. That matters for residents who have watched parking and traffic top the list of local complaints for decades. But it also matters for the visitors themselves — including the very ones we’re talking about.

Think about it from their perspective. They flew here specifically. They left their car at home. And what they find — if we get this right — is something most of them almost never experience: a downtown they can actually walk. Narrow historic streets. A human scale that invites wandering rather than driving. The kind of place where you stumble onto a tucked-away bar on a side street, or a local artist’s studio, or a perfect slice of key lime pie, precisely because you’re on foot and not rushing past in a car.

That experience — unhurried, exploratory, genuinely different from the car-dominated places most visitors come from — is itself part of what makes Key West worth flying to. It’s not incidental to the golden goose. It’s part of what the golden goose is selling.

The more we invest in making that experience real — better transit, wider sidewalks, safe bike infrastructure, a revitalized Duval Street — the more we deliver on the promise that brought these visitors here. And the more reason they’ll have to come back, and to tell others.

What This Means — and What We Should Do

If airport visitors are better for the Key West we want to keep, the implications are pretty straightforward.

Keep investing in airport access. More direct flights from more cities means more visitors who chose Key West specifically. The airport’s growth isn’t something to resist — it’s infrastructure that supports the local economy we want.

Invest in what attracts and serves engaged visitors. That means bringing back an improved Duval Loop and new fixed-route transit service connecting the airport, hotels, and downtown. It means moving forward with the Duval Street Resiliency and Revitalization Plan — wider sidewalks, better bike infrastructure, public spaces worth experiencing. It means funding arts and cultural institutions that give visitors a reason to fly here specifically, not just drive through.

Protect and market what makes us irreplaceable. Goombay. Fantasy Fest. Womenfest. Pride Month. These events don’t just celebrate who we are — they’re what people fly here for, and they’re exactly what’s in the crosshairs of the State’s anti-diversity legislation. Our City Commission, our business community, and our tourism leadership should be their loudest and most unambiguous champions. The economics demand it, even if the politics feel complicated.

Market to visitors who will engage. The TDC’s job is to attract overnight visitors who spend money in the local economy. That means leading with Key West’s culture, history, arts scene, and natural environment — not just beaches and bars. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But visitors who want to explore, discover, and connect with what makes this place irreplaceable are the ones who keep the golden goose healthy.

Recognize that how visitors arrive is economic development. Airport growth isn’t just a transportation story — it’s about the kind of tourism economy we’re building, and the kind of Key West we’re preserving in the process.

The Bottom Line

The airport numbers aren’t just about transportation. They’re about who comes to Key West, why they come, and what kind of place we become.

Most candidates are talking about keeping Key West Key West. Every local knows what that means — the funky, inclusive, One Human Family character that makes this island irreplaceable. But keeping it requires an economy that rewards our uniqueness, one that attracts visitors who flew here because there is no place else like this, certainly not on the car-centric Florida mainland.

More airport passengers means more of those visitors. The kind who walk our streets, eat in our restaurants, attend our festivals, explore our museums, and spend money that keeps the golden goose healthy. The kind whose very presence makes the economic case for everything that makes Key West worth fighting for.

So, the next time someone reacts to record airport numbers like it’s bad news — tell them they’re wrong. And now you know why.

# # #

Chris Hamilton is the founder of Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown, a local advocacy group championing sustainable mobility and vibrant public spaces. Subscribe to the blog and follow on Facebook, Twitter, and Substack for updates. All stories are cross posted at KONK Life News. Originally from Washington, D.C., Chris spent over two decades leading nationally acclaimed initiatives in transit, biking, walking, and smart growth for Arlington County, VA’s DOT. Since moving to Key West in 2015, he has embraced a car-free lifestyle downtown, dedicating his time to non-profits and community projects. Explore all Streets for People column articles here.