ppaca wrote:Nothing going to happen until parking garages are built out there.
Parking garages are the LAST thing we need. They would only create concentrated areas of continual ingress and egress onto already jammed roads, exacerbating the problem.
What we need, and it isn't going to happen, is to stop spending millions of tourism dollars to bring more and more people to a place that has NO BUSINESS inviting more visitors when it can't begin to handle the ones it has. And that's purely and simply because of the size and configuration of this part of the island, which cannot be changed except perhaps by a major act of Nature.
One thing that people need to understand is that traffic is not only a problem for those trying to come onto the beach, but also for those trying to depart -- and the latter group is not looking for parking places, they only want to travel down the road and leave! Just this past Saturday evening -- NOT a Spring Break day, NOT a holiday, NOT a vacation day, just a sunny beach day -- it took us well over a half hour to travel the short 1-1/2 miles straight down Via de Luna from our home just east of the churches to the traffic light, creeping and stopping all the way. All we wanted to do was go into Pensacola for dinner, realizing the beach eateries would likely all be jammed.
I wrote a PNJ Viewpoint about this last year, and some article commenters (and a few of you) accused me, as a beach resident, of trying to keep other people out. BALONEY!! We love seeing people come out and enjoy the beach, and noting the multitude of out-of-state plates on the road just makes us proud and grateful to live here. But we residents, and all those same many visitors, were all stuck in the same traffic jam Saturday night. I felt sorry for all the fidgeting kids (and their parents) in the adjacent cars, and wondered how many of these people had appointments and/or reservations that they were surely going to miss. Heaven help the resident or visitor who makes an outbound plane reservation for a Saturday evening. Better leave for the airport many hours ahead of flight time!
Last year, right before I wrote that Viewpoint, the manager of the top-rated Holiday Inn Express on Ft. Pickens Rd. lamented that many of her guests posting on Trip Advisor and other review sites said they loved the beach but hated the traffic, and might never come back because of it. Who can blame them? This could fall under the law of diminishing returns, if you'll pardon the pun.
Sorry, shouldn't have gotten started. It's a very, very sore issue with us. We have nothing against growth and development but there has been a culture of "more and bigger regardless" out here for way too long, with woefully little rational thought as to how in the world this little island was going to accommodate everyone. Well, guess what, people? IT CAN'T.
Look, park and ride has been attempted in the past, and it didn't work. The ferries will be a tourist attraction and a temporary novelty, but due to cost and inconvenience will not alleviate any significant amount of vehicle traffic. That's somebody's pipe dream. Meanwhile, countless beach traffic studies languish on shelves, gathering dust, because no one has ever been able to come up with a truly viable and affordable solution.
I continue to believe that the only answer is to recognize our limitations, make some reasonable traffic accommodations to the best of our ability, and quit trying to be Miami Beach. Just STOP the tourism ads. There will still be more than enough people coming here due to word of mouth -- and they’ll be repeat visitors year after year, IF they don't have to spend hours of their precious vacation time stuck in stinking traffic. __LL
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