Glades Road Night Paving Starts Tuesday

night-paving
We previously reported that the Glades Road repaving project (Gladesmageddon as we called it) was to start last week. But the April 27 start date came and went. A couple days ago the electronic signs changes and now we have a new start date on Tuesday, May 5th, and a change to “night paving.”
to-begin
We spoke to the county’s Adam Faustini, Assistant Director of “Road and Bridge.” He told us that the project was delayed by rain that slowed prior projects. The shift to night paving was a result of vehicle counts.
The night paving will start at roughly 8 pm most nights, though that may be just getting things in order and the real work may not get going until 9 pm. They expect to cut off work around 6 am most mornings.
Mr. Faustini did not expect any total road closures. There will be single lane closures which means both directions should generally remain open, with rare exceptions possible. The plan is to have a moving train of miller (ripping up the old pavement) and paver (laying new pavement), doing one lane at a time. Flag men will divert traffic as necessary.
We originally reported on the Glades and Cain repaving projects back in March.
Faustini mentioned another project on Camino Real but that appears to be east of Federal Highway.

Crime in Palm Beach County: By Zip Code

jimmy-crime-scene
What parts of Palm Beach County have the most crime? What parts have the least? We’ve got answers by zip code.
Measured by arrest counts vs. population, West Delray Beach’s zip code 33446 has the lowest crime rate in Palm Beach County. With 22,571 people and only 24 counts, the rate of arrest counts per population was the lowest in the county at just over one in a thousand.
Riviera Beach’s zip code 33404 was the worst, with 1034 arrest counts booked in a population of 26,634. That crime rate is nearly 40 times as high as in West Delray, and roughly quadruple the county average of one count per hundred residents.
West Boca News readers will be pleased to hear that four of our five zip codes were in the top 10 for lowest crime out of 51 zip codes in the county. And the #1 West Delray is probably our sixth zip code since we often hear from readers in Saturnia Isles, The Bridges, and Mizner Country Club.
Here’s the Top 25 in lowest crime rates (West Boca zips are in blue):
PBC - Top 25 Lowest Crime
We’ve included zip code maps of the county at the bottom of the post.
Here’s the worst 26:
Bottom 26
We previously wrote about the crime rate in West Boca, and arrest rates in all nine Boca Raton zip codes.
A couple of notes about the data are in order. First, this is for only a three-month period – the first three months of 2014. We hope to do this again covering a longer period and think that will be more accurate overall.
Second, we don’t have perfect data and we didn’t go through it as thoroughly as we’d like to. Some of the counts are for things like “Booked – Recommit” or “Fail to Appear” which are not really crimes in and of themselves. The number of counts is also imperfect. When we went through Boca Raton in our earlier articles, the counts per arrest number ranged from 1.6 to 2.1. We’ve seen cases where one person is arrested and charged with over 30 counts. And our population numbers are for 2011, which makes them somewhat out of date. Overall we think these issues are minor but could be significant for some zip codes.
Third, some of the zip codes we included are small, making the data a bit less reliable. Canal Point’s zip code 33438 was second-worst, but the population is only 354 so the numbers are statistically dubious. Similarly, West Boynton’s 33473 (the GL Homes Canyon developments) ranked #2 in lowest arrest rate, but the population for that zip code is less than 4000. This should be less of a problem when we do this for a longer period of time.
Fourth, the zip codes are for the address of the person arrested, not necessarily for the place where the crime was committed.
Fifth, some of the arrests in the data had the wrong zip codes. For example, zip code 33425 is listed as having 24 arrest counts, 33422 had 12 and 33416 has 10. These three zip codes all have zero population. Over 500 of the nearly 15,000 or so arrests are attributed to zip code 00000, and another large chunk are from 4-digit or 6-digit zip codes. And there are big groups from other counties, especially Broward and Miami-Dade. We also left out the Tequesta zip code because most of it is in Martin County. We reduced the data to 13,093 arrest counts in a population of over 1.3 million people in the county.

Zip codes in northeast PBC
Zip codes in northeast PBC

Southeast county zips
Southeast county zips

West County zips
West County zips

How Bad is Crime in West Boca?

crime-tape
After hearing concerns that our arrest reports were making West Boca look bad, we decided to do some research. We have good news.
We’re doing a three-part series on crime statistics in West Boca, Boca Raton, and Palm Beach County. In this first part of the series, we compare West Boca to East Boca, and both to the county as a whole.

Update: In Part 2 we look at arrest rates by zip code in all of Boca Raton.

We requested data on every person booked by the Palm Beach County Sheriff in the first quarter of 2014. That data includes the zip code of the arrested person’s residence. Boca Raton has nine zip codes. There are various ways to break down east vs. west. For this exercise (and for other purposes) we define West Boca as being the following five zip codes: 33428, 33498, 33496, 33434 and 33433, with a total population of roughly 135,000 people.
west-boca-zip-codes
west-boca-zipsEast Boca is then the remaining four zip codes, 33431, 33432, 33486 and 33487, with 75,000 people.
The breakdown isn’t perfect. The city’s own data shows the municipal population at 84,000.
Here’s what the city lines look like:
Boca Raton City Map
There is no perfect division of east and west, but the zip codes are very helpful here because each arrest has a zip code associated with it.
It’s also important to note here that the Sheriff’s data includes every count someone’s arrested for as a separate line. In other words, if someone is arrested for battery and for resisting, that’s two counts. In January a man in West Boca was arrested for 36 counts of sexual assault on a minor. That kind of data could really skew the numbers.
So does it make sense to compare crime by number of counts, or by number of arrests? Again there’s no perfect answer. However within Boca, both east and west were close to 1.8 counts per arrest so it shouldn’t matter within Boca. And for county-wide numbers, it would be a lot of work to reduce to just arrests so we’re just going with counts.
West Boca Has Low Crime
The two biggest results we have to report are first that West Boca has a lower crime rate than East Boca, and that Boca as a whole has a much lower crime rate than the county as a whole.
In West Boca there were 1.7 arrests and 2.9 counts per thousand people in the first quarter. East Boca had significantly higher numbers with 2.9 arrests and 5.4 counts per 1000 people. While this might make East Boca seem bad, their numbers are actually much better than the county as a whole.
Palm Beach County has a population of about 1.35 million, and there were almost 15,000 counts county-wide, which means the county crime rate of 11 counts per 1000 people. Taking Boca out of the data gets it to over 12 counts per 1000 people in the rest of the county (i.e. north of Boca). So crime rates in the rest of the county are twice as high as East Boca and almost four times as high as West Boca
We’re still working on the data. In the next part we will go through Boca Raton to see which zip codes have the most arrests and which have the least.


Please keep in mind that there are all kinds of potential problems with our analysis. We did not look at the type or severity of the crimes people were arrested for – at least not yet. Counts can be felonies, misdemeanors, non-criminal infractions, probation violations, recommits and others. We did not (and could not) look at crimes by where they happened, instead relying on the address of the person arrested. Of course, people are innocent until proven guilty and the numbers cannot account for guilt. And there are other problems we haven’t even thought of. Comparing and contrasting our analysis and data with Crime Statistics Australia might aid us in deepening our future analysis, increasing the data range that we can draw on to better judge the local crime trends.