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U.S.-1/S. Federal Highway & S.E. 5th Street, Hallandale Beach, FL as seen by Google Street View, April 2011. Looking west from Village at Gulfstream Park. For those of you who live far from me, there's no traffic light there, rather it's just traffic going in four different directions all at the same time! SNAFU!
The image above is of the intersection directly in front of Hallandale Beach City Hall, to the upper right, and the Main Post Office to the left,
(Correct, the Post Office whose parking lot was pitch-black at night for over an entire year,)
How perfect is this image for describing what things are really like here in chaotic S.E. Broward County, where someplace four miles away can take 20 minutes to get to?
From my perspective, the only thing that's really missing above are the cars making the illegal left-hand turns south onto U.S.-1 from The Village at Gulfstream Park retail complex -near Crate & Barrel, Container Store, Pottery Barn and West Elm- which I observe a few times a day, but which the HB Police, located across the street next to City Hall, never EVER notice.
Even though the vast majority of the thousands of seasonal French-Canadian residents this area gets every Fall and Winter have long since started making their trek back to Québec and Ontario, in the late afternoon here, there is still often gridlocked traffic on U.S.-1/Federal Highway/Biscayne Blvd. from Hallandale Beach Blvd. all the way south to the Ives Dairy/N.E. 203rd Street exits in Aventura, a few blocks south of Aventura Hospital, a place that as many of you know, I have become all-too-familiar with over the past two years.
That's a distance of just barely below three miles, one I frequently walk when the weather is nice and I'm going to catch a movie or do something at the nearby Aventura Mall, but it's often at least a 15 minute drive, since there is no other way available to get to that part of HB because of the Atlantic Intercoastal Waterway and Gulfstream Park.
(Most smart people in Aventura needing to get to I-95 North know that to beat the impossible traffic on Ives Dairy, it's much quicker and less-stressful to simply make a left on N.E. 208th Str. and catch E. Dixie Highway north -parallel to the FEC Railroad tracks- which becomes S.E.1st Ave. in HB, then hang a left across the RR tracks at County Line Road (N.E. 215th Street/S.W. 11th Street) and then take it to S.W. 8th Ave., turn right and go north, coming come out on Hallandale Beach Blvd., with 1-95 a half-mile to your left.)
These physical and geographical hindrances to easier and more common sense driving in this crowded area are made worse by the inadequate and myopic planning by the City of Hallandale Beach the past 45 years, as I'll be discussing in much more detail soon, since there has not been a single new road going north-south or east-west in that area to relieve the stress on U.S.-1 in the past forty-five years.
This is made all the worse by the deal struck years ago by the officials of Gulfstream Park with the City of Aventura -and the silence of FDOT- to NOT create a road extending N.E. 213th Street west from U.S.-1 to E. Dixie Highway, despite plenty of space to do so, to get traffic onto secondary roads with no residents.
Gulfstream's deal with the City of Aventura forces all north-bound cars to pass Gulfstream Park.
It's no mystery why there's gridlock around here, since there's plenty of blame to go around.
Elsewhere in the state, over four hours north of us, we have news about the the logical result of living in Florida for too long: Bad Florida drivers, Bad Florida gridlock and Bad Florida roads equals...VERY BAD Judgement
Cops: Girl's Kin Towed Her Toy Car Behind SUV. Drunken Florida grandparents busted for child cruelty
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/