Mid-May brings a welcome relief from what many locals find most irksome about “season”: traffic. I recently drove from 301 and 41 in Sarasota all the way to 41 and Florida Boulevard in Bradenton (which is well past the airport) without hitting one red light. That’s just not possible when our snowbirds are here. There’s an interesting counterintuitive caveat in urban planning literature about traffic, that it’s often not the long car trips that clog our roads. Nope, it’s the short trips we make—to the post office, the drug store or the grocery store. The way we have organized our built environment, for many of us, simple tasks of everyday life may only be accomplished with a car. And all those short trips make for lots of traffic. I was reminded of this reality at a Lido Key Neighborhood Association meeting a few months ago.

Sarasota’s iconic John Ringling Bridge can become a parking lot during high season. A friend of mine who lives near the downtown end of the John Ringling Bridge shared that she has friends on Longboat Key who call her during season and ask how the traffic is on the bridge so they can decide whether they should get in the car for their trip to Sarasota’s “mainland”, or wait until it’s less congested. Another friend reports that her buddy on Lido Key carefully plans her day when she ventures into downtown and beyond because bridge traffic is so heavy. A 20-minute trip can become 40 minutes or more each way during season.

At that Lido Key Neighborhood Association Meeting in January, many residents commented about their frustration with traffic and how crossing the bridge took so long. But one woman’s comment really caught my attention. “To do anything,” she said, “to go to the post office, to buy groceries, to fill a prescription, I have to get in the car and cross that bridge.” The packed room was full of neighbors nodding in agreement.

It wasn’t always this way, another resident chimed in. Lido Key used to have a convenience store, a small pharmacy. What happened? I’m not sure how or why those businesses left, but as a neighborhood advocate I’ve learned that many times people perceive a purely residential community as more desirable. A fair criticism of NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) protests may be that advocating for a purely residential built environment in our neighborhoods has made us all auto-dependent to such an extreme that we have to get behind the wheel to do anything—like buy a loaf of bread.

There are surely ways to incorporate commercial and multifamily residential building into Sarasota neighborhoods, which are beautiful, functional and will take pressure off our roads. This kind of building, a mini “Main Street” approach, could include affordable apartments above businesses, which offer everyday services closer to home. Maybe building more bridges and widening roads isn’t the only, or even the best answer to our traffic woes. Maybe building more self-sufficient neighborhoods is.

Cathy Antunes is host of "The Detail" on WSRQ.