Further evaluations will need to be conducted to verify potential for involvement with a Section 4(f) property. Coordination with the Official with Jurisdiction (OWJ), dependent on the property type, is necessary to obtain a significance determination.
The Sociocultural Data Report (SDR) produced from the ETDM screening tool uses the US Census Bureau American Community Survey Five-Year data from 2016-2020. An estimated 142,891 people live within the study region. The predominant race is white (79%), followed by black or African American (9.5%), and the remaining races accounting for just over 1%. The majority of residents are not of Hispanic or Latino ethnicity (72%). The population of the study region trends older, similar to the rest of the state, with over 30% aged 65 and older. The median household income of $39,994 for the study region is significantly lower than the state average ($57,703) and 17% of households are below the poverty line. Only 15% of residents aged 25 and older have a bachelor's degree or higher, which is significantly lower than the state average of 31%. Ninety-five percent of occupied dwelling units (households) have access to at least one vehicle which supports the notion that auto travel is the main transportation mode for accessing jobs and services within the study region.
As documented in the Statewide Regional Evacuation Study by the Florida Division of Emergency Management, US 27 serves as a primary north-south emergency evacuation route for the southern portion of the State. It serves as an alternative to I-75 and I-95, supporting evacuation from the more densely populated southern Florida and coastal counties including the Florida Keys. When the state experienced Hurricane Irma in 2017, 6.8 million Floridians evacuated their homes, mostly in southern Florida. US 27 was used as a major evacuation route to move Floridians north into Central Florida and outside of the state. During that time, portions of US 27 through Highlands County experienced travel times nearly four times higher than normal. This is not sustainable in a worst-case scenario emergency.
Mass evacuation events such as Hurricane Irma demonstrate that US 27 along with Florida's main interstates do not have the capacity to handle the totality of traffic evacuating as well as the need to support the movements of disaster response teams and recovery fleets. As storm frequency and intensity increase due to changing climate conditions, additional capacity is needed on the transportation network to serve regional evacuation trips and alleviate the increased congestion and travel times on the US 27 corridor.
Within the Heartland region, there are currently no limited-access, north-south roadway facilities, and north-south routes are limited mainly to US 27 and US 17. An analysis of available detours from the District One Arterial Rural Highways Study demonstrates that if US 27 is obstructed, the next best available route will take an average of 52 minutes longer and will add 48 additional miles to the trip length (Figure 15 and Table 11). This intensifies when multiple facilities are obstructed or fail due to crashes, major weather events and natural hazards such as wildfires and flooding. This lack of options for detours makes US 27 and the entire Southwest Florida transportation network vulnerable to natural hazard and disruptive events. This concern became substantially
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