Today, the Tybee Island city council voted unanimously to overturn that earlier vote.

From the Associated Press, Tybee Island scraps plan to track license plates:

Mayor Jason Buelterman (BELL-tuhr-man) said city officials had learned the machines wouldn’t automatically tally how many cars were visiting the island. He said the decision was also influenced by backlash from residents and visitors who felt the scanners would violate their privacy.

It was clear from earlier discussions that at least one council member wanted to advertise the presence of the scanners to discourage criminals from coming onto the island at all.

I’m glad to see that Tybee backed off on this plan.

The Tybee City Councilâ€s vote Thursday night to purchase two license plate reading cameras means in the near future every vehicle that drives on and off the island city will be scanned.

Council voted 5-1 late Thursday to approve the purchase suggested by Police Chief Bob Bryson of the scanners to be installed in both directions of U.S. 80 on the Lazaretto Creek Bridge. Barry Brown opposed the vote to purchase the system that will run license plate tags against criminal information databases like the National Crime Information Center and the Georgia Crime Information Center.

The purchase was approved even though there is no policy statement about how the information will be handled. Tybee officials are promising that a policy will be in place soon, however, and that it will do such things as mandate that all information not part of a criminal investigation be destroyed after 72 hours.

But who’s to say exactly what is part of a criminal investigation?

There’s only one way on and off Tybee Island, of course. So imagine there’s a burglary some night and the police have few clues except a witness’ vague description of a car that left the scene. That investigation could go on for days or weeks or maybe even months. So would the Tybee police, an organization that has seen its fair share of controversy over the years, just sit on all that data, much of which could be used to identify movements of law-abiding citizens who guard their privacy?

And what about subpoenas and civil actions — contentious divorces and the like?

On an island as small as Tybee, can we even be sure that those with access to the plate numbers won’t have personal contacts in other contexts with the folks who are legally coming and going?

Are these paranoid questions? I don’t know, because there is no policy in place for how the information will be used.

The article notes a clear upside in using the data for economic studies — we can literally get hard counts of the number of cars and even know states and counties from which they come. That information could be beneficial in myriad ways.

But we can get pretty good tourism data via other means.

I don’t know quite what to make of statements in the article about the ways in which a policy like this, if well-publicized, might deter criminals from coming on to the island. I suppose that’s possible, but how exactly will the policy be publicized? And do we really want some draconian warning to be part of Tybee’s reputation?

For many, Tybee has been a place where one can get away from some of the demands of modern life — and it has been to some extent a haven for libertarians who like to live and let live.

It would be hard — maybe impossible — to see Tybee like that if law enforcement starts running checks on every car that comes on or off the island.

It’s a great exploration of the road’s lousy safety record and statistically high death rate, and it does an even better job of discussing the challenges regarding funding the most likely fixes, which would primarily involve rebuilding the Bull River and Lazaretto Creek bridges so that they have safe shoulders.

But I have to note that the piece leaves out the sort of critical info that in 2012 area residents soundly rejected an additional 1 percent sales tax that would have funded infrastructure projects. It would have covered all or part of the needed improvements on Highway 80, which by law would have had to be completed since they were on the final project list.

I know people had lots of reasons for opposing T-SPLOST. I’ve been puzzled since that vote, however, that one simple calculation didn’t carry more weight with voters: If we improve those bridges and address a few other safety issues, it’s almost certain that fewer people will die on the road to Tybee.

The optimistic scenario cited in the piece suggests that substantive work on these safety issues could begin in 2018 or 2019. Given the simple reality of transportation funding in the state, don’t count on that.

Of possible interest: my August 2012 column TSPLOST fallout: Sometimes the money just isn’t there, detailing the near-certainty that the bulk of Georgia’s limited transportation budget would go to the Atlanta metro area, and my post here at the same time: A few final thoughts on T-SPLOST

I hadn’t been out to Tybee in a while by myself, and I hadn’t taken any photos out there for well over a year.

I just wandered around, got briefly in the water, walked along the pier, had an excellent dinner at the bar at the Tybee Island Social Club (loved the lobster tail taco), and then headed over to the lighthouse when I knew there should be some beautiful (if corny) sunset light.

The traffic and parking can be hellish on Tybee visits on the weekends and holidays, but, even at high summer, weekday evenings are pretty quiet as you can see.

So a few shots; click for larger versions:

And here are a couple of shots that I posted to my Instagram account:

I know it’s kind of trite, but I love the way the Instagram app will allow selective focus blurring like on the one taken from the pier.

• Incredibly irresponsible behavior by the party’s organizers who made no provision and the attendees who devoted not energy for cleaning up the beach at Tybee.
• Irresponsible behavior of a different sort the following day by online commenters who viewed the behavior as incredibly exceptional. The suggestion was that somehow the gathering of young black adults defiled the beach in ways that it has never been.

I should have taken photos of Forsyth Park in the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Daniels show last spring or the more recent of Montreal concert. Of the two, the Charlie Daniels show seemed by far the worst — the park was disgustingly filthy.

Yes, we have in our heads an image of pristine beaches, but I think we all know that Tybee near the pier is hardly pristine, and it’s hard by any logical measure to see how trash left on the ground above the high tide line is dramatically different than trash left in Forsyth or left on Savannah streets to wash into storm sewers on St. Patrick’s Day.

Big gatherings of Americans in public places have one pretty predictable result: mounds of trash.

So let’s hope that some young people at Orange Crush today take the lead in helping keep the beach clean. 

And let’s hope that Tybee officials are better prepared than last year. They certainly seem to be.

It certainly looks like those two hopes will be tested. The weather is beautiful, and a Twitter search for “orange crush” is finding new tweets about every eight seconds right now.

For a lot more about last year’s Orange Crush and the controversies it spawned, check out my post from last year: The many lessons of Orange Crush 2K12, which includes the morning after video of trash on the beach that fueled the controversy.

The comments are especially interesting.

The current bridges have insufficient shoulders for broken down cars, for emergency vehicle access when traffic is backed up, little room for drivers to veer out of the way if an oncoming car crosses the center line, and no safe area for cyclists. These problems rear their heads routinely in fatal crashes and massive traffic tie-ups.

The plan unveiled this week addresses those needs and the need for wider shoulders along the entire stretch of road.

Check out the chosen plan — Alternative 3 — on this page at the Metropolitan Planning Commission website.

The plan wasn’t forged in secrecy, by the way. There were public meetings in both 2010 and 2011, and local planning officials are among the most approachable public employees in the region.

The chosen plan would replace the Bull River and Lazaretto Creek bridges with new ones with 10-foot bikeable shoulders plus a 10-foot barrier-separated multi-use trail. The entire roadway would get 10-foot paved shoulders. Near Fort Pulaski, the road would be restriped for both left-hand and right-hand turn lanes. A left-hand turn lane would also be added going into an improved parking area at the McQueen’s Island Trail.

So the new plan would address our critical needs.

But an editorial today by the Savannah Morning News (where I am obviously a longtime freelance columnist) calls for rethinking the project and making the bridges four lanes. From Tybee bridges: Size matters:

AREA RESIDENTS got a chance to view the proposed plan to replace the two bridges on U.S. 80 to Tybee Island during an open house Monday night, and it was eye-opening — and not on the pleasant side.

The proposals for the new Bull River and Lazaretto Creek bridges calls for replacing the two current, two-lane bridges with two more two-lane bridges.

Why not go with four-lane bridges? That would seem more prudent. If youâ€re going to go to the trouble and expense of improving access to coastal Georgiaâ€s top beach destination, wouldnâ€t you want to do it right and completely eliminate the existing bridge bottlenecks?

Let’s get this clear. It makes no sense to expand the bridges to four lanes without expanding the entire road to four lanes. Making the bridges into four lanes would do nothing to increase overall road capacity if the traffic has to merge back to two lanes on the other side. In fact, making the bridges four lanes would increase speeds, encourage risky passing, and make the subsequent merges dangerous.

As for making the entire road four lanes:
1) we don’t have the money — not even close,
2) the environmental permitting involved in such a massive widening would take years, and
3) Tybee Island is so small and has such limited parking that expanding road capacity would exacerbate existing problems.

On the point of money, the chosen alternative is projected to cost more than $60 million. The plan is to use federal funds, but that’s a roll of the dice. If we had passed the T-SPLOST last summer, we would have raised all the necessary money right here in the county and we’d have those bridges completed within a decade.

Of course, if we demand four-lane bridges, the cost would increase by millions and so would long-term maintenance and repairs.

As things stand now, we’re left to hope that the money will come through. That’s a huge federal expenditure to service an area that’s so small and has so few year-round residents. Give that some thought as we debate the role of the federal government and complain about “waste”.

So funding problems could push the project farther off.

A public chorus of ill-founded complaints might push it even farther off.

Here’s a detail of the selected plan for the long bridge across the Bull River:

It’s a good plan.

Click here for my City Talk column (“T-SPLOST fallout: Sometimes the money just isn’t there”) in the Savannah Morning News, which discusses the future of state spending in regions like ours.

Ironically, on Saturday, folks were stuck at Tybee again — or were stuck trying to get to Tybee. Another wreck on the Lazaretto Creek bridge shut down traffic apparently for a few hours.

The T-SPLOST would have put three new bridges with safer shoulders and perhaps other modifications on the road to Tybee — at Lazaretto Creek, at Bull River, at the Wilmington River. I don’t know enough details about yesterday’s accident to say if a wider bridge would have prevented the accident or might have facilitated travel much sooner after the accident. But it’s pretty clear that our current bridges are not safe and that they are sometimes serious impediments to traffic flow.

The referendum, which was soundly rejected last Tuesday, would have raised close to $70 million to replace those bridges. As I have kept saying, by law GDOT would have had to complete those projects. The project list was generated through a long public process involving local and regional leaders, but those same leaders would have had no power to change the list once it was approved.

By the way, even with the T-SPLOST, we wouldn’t have gotten those bridges for years. That’s a lot of money to serve an area with so few businesses and so little population.

As I say in today’s column, we might get lucky with those projects. But don’t expect it.

I do note that maybe the door is now open for smaller and smarter projects that promote better urbanism within the Savannah city limits.

For relatively little cost, we can reduce capacity on various streets that obviously have more than we need or that facilitate dangerous speeds. I’m thinking about a street like Whitaker, which could have one travel lane with parking and with wider tree lawns or sidewalks for most or all of its length. We can seek other funding to take down the I-16 flyover, which has been a terrible impediment to downtown traffic, commerce, and quality of life.

We can get serious about making it easier for drivers to park in on-street spaces in horribly underutilized portions of the Historic District. Click here for a post from last summer about the overly short time limits and the overly high prices for on-street parking around some squares. Everything I say there is still valid today.

We can also get serious about slowing down traffic crossing Bull, Abercorn, and Barnard streets by enforcing the existing law requiring drivers to stop for pedestrians already in the crosswalks.

Even though Savannah State University officials urged students not to participate in last weekend’s Orange Crush and even though it seems pretty clear that the event attracted attendees — many of them not college students — from throughout the region, students at SSU are now leading an effort for a daylong beach cleanup at Tybee on Saturday.

From the blog Tales of Tigers:

Last week, Dr. Irvin Clark sent an email to the student body encouraging them not to attend the festivities as a safety warning, and encouraged them to participate in other activities. Dr. Clark serves as the universityâ€s vice president of student affairs.

Students at Savannah State are currently launching a campaign entitled “Green Crush” to help promote the cleaning as well as the maintenance of Tybee Island.

The Twitter thread is interesting to read. One tweeter questions whether calling the event Green Crush will give the impression that SSU students caused most of the problems of Orange Crush — and it’s a good question. There are a few other doubts expressed, but the discussion is overwhelmingly upbeat and positive.

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