Let’s all hold out for flying cars

Published: February 28, 2016

Let's start with this: With the possible exception of contractors and their work crews, nobody loves road construction.

The dust. The disruption. The diversions. The barriers. The noise and confusion. The teeth-rattling make-do patches until the finished paving goes down — or, worse, the gigantic, gap-bridging metal plates.

Turn lanes vanish overnight, and new travel patterns breeding bottlenecks materialize. Then, possibly most maddening of all: The wait — sometimes days, often weeks — between the end of construction and when the painting crews arrive to lay down the lane indicators.

The entire process is a modern-day trial of every motorist's charitable nature. Which, as we all know, is not in generous supply in the first place. And no sooner do they finish, it seems, than they're back at it, ripping up and blocking off, squeezing and detouring.

Road construction is on our minds this morning not simply because it is inevitable in this persistently popular part of the world, but also because the impossibility of what we demand — motoring that is efficient and unharried with none of the inconveniences of construction or man-made blight upon the landscape — is approaching critical mass.

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Honestly, it's enough to make you wonder why bright people with unlimited choices choose to take up traffic engineering in the first place. There must be something alluring about the plotting of exotic interchanges along limited-access thoroughfares, is all I can think. That, or it pays a ton. Because there is scant evidence that their work pleases much of anybody.

Two more-or-less pending projects stand as prickly evidence of this. One involves the intersection of State Road 54 and U.S. 41 in Land O' Lakes — which is already beyond clogged most hours of most days — and the other an increasingly bustling stretch of U.S. 301 connecting Zephyrhills' northern boundary to the U.S. 98 Bypass on Dade City's eastern flank.

No one who routinely encounters either of these clogged arteries reasonably can reject the idea that some alleviation is necessary. The question is: What?

Land O' Lakes loyalists have rejected, with firmness and energy, the fly-over that has been on the Florida Department of Transportation's long-term projects map for something like 20 years. A couple of years back, they erupted over a proposed elevated tollway running down the heart of S.R. 54 slicing through the heart of their community, but they're equally furious about the prospect of its smaller cousin displacing long-established businesses and homeowners.

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Alas, as Pasco County planning chief Richard Gehring routinely notes, the existing geography, particularly the railroad tracks flanking U.S. 41 to the west, limit design options. Already 99,000 vehicles pass through the crossroads daily, and — assuming no flying-cars-for-the-masses breakthroughs — the number will only increase.

Now, while Gehring has been known to indulge hyperbole when it suits him — his suggestion Pasco's future was either that doomed elevated tollway or gargantuan Los Angeles-style freeways was met with mockery — his prediction of pass-through times of nearly 40 minutes if nothing is done seems entirely reasonable.

My guess: We're going to become acutely acquainted with the nuances of eminent domain. At least there's neither a stadium nor a casino parking lot involved.

Still, the good folks at Pasco's Metropolitan Planning Organization are open to suggestion, as they have been about the future of that aforementioned stretch of U.S. 301.

Residents correctly have noted the unusually scenic nature of the rolling terrain, and their resistance to outright expansion is noble, if — as the population continues to swell — not altogether practical. Last week Dade City commissioners built a $3,200 impact fee into the building of every new house, which they expect to collect 2,500 times.

That's a lot of new drivers, and a lot of new north-south traffic. The idea that they'll find satisfactory accommodation in the expansion of parallel frontage roads is quaint, but seems insufficient to the demand.

Still, we were promised flying cars. Flying cars would make this much simpler. Maybe we should hold out for flying cars. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Source: Let's all hold out for flying cars