Clay Traffic Stinks: Maybe Our Planners Were Drunk as Skunks

Detours, Delays and Disappearing Dollars

The sober guy gets to use the pencil.

For the last few years, it has looked like the folks in charge of road construction in our county had decided to stage the apocalypse on our county streets and highways.

Nope. They were just getting around to major repairs and massive projects that have been on the to-do list since the Reagan Administration. And they decided to do them all at once—major roads, side streets, hiking trails, bike paths, alleyways, footpaths and their friends’ driveways.

As a result, our daily commute and trips to the grocery store has been turned into a live-action gridlock. Clay citizens have been plagued by surprise road closures, detours, and disappearing lanes that have forced both saints and sinners to sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic and make up new swear words.

It was hard for me to imagine how a highway person could look at decades of untouched road projects and say “Hey, let’s do these projects so we can disrupt traffic at every major artery in Clay County all at once and then proceed at the pace of an overweight snail.”

The only logical reason, I guessed, for such orchestrated chaos by local and state road planners was liquor—liquid lunches. Not second-round sipping where you get a little tipsy, but multiple rounds where somebody ends up drunk-dialing his ex-wife and doesn’t remember it until one of Sheriff Cook’s deputies serve him with a restraining order.

Then something happened that seemed to confirm my suspicions. The road poohbahs proposed a roundabout on the 2.5-mile College Drive, because nothing says great traffic solutions like a carousel of confused drivers who don’t have a clue what they’re doing.

Sure, there are positives with roundabouts on busy congested roads in “urban cities” with multiple street entries. They slow traffic which results in fewer fatal accidents. But there are negatives in small cities and suburban areas like ours. Research says roundabouts can lead to “incorrect lane choices, missed exits, overall disorientation, and accidents, especially with bicyclers.”

To combat roundabout confusion, road-gurus usually recommend obtaining extra land and funding to build something “visually pleasing,” in the center so drivers can feel better about driving in a circle. A duck pond was one suggestion. No kidding.

For some reason, somebody in the county nixed the College Drive roundabout. Rumor has it the road guys or gals went out and watched drivers operate the existing roundabout exiting the Lowes parking lot in Middleburg. Since the roundabout lengthens the five-second exit to five minutes, people drive straight across the bottom. Some people get vertigo and have to stop mid-circle and local farmers avoid it altogether since they believe it’s a crop circle.

Several county employees said it was scrapped because brighter minds prevailed—those living and working on and around College Drive.

The road construction circus has gone on so long that many citizens and business owners have numerous rear-in-nuisance stories to tell.

One of my neighbors said she tried to go to Publix and ended up at a llama farm in Middleburg.

A huge sinkhole developed on Moody Avenue, a suburban conduit to Kingsley Avenue, one of the busiest streets in town. The county erected “temporary closed signs” along Moody, but repairs took so long, GPSes considered dropping it thinking it no longer existed.

In late evenings the dimly lit State Road 17 and County Road 220, one of the largest intersections in the county, looks like a disaster movie set. Huge tank-like trucks creates a wide barrier down the center of 17 for miles and miles while traffic is backed up and down as far as the eye can see. Drivers have to travel north for a place to turn around and make their way back to reach 220.

It’s surely dangerous for drivers and workers shrouded in the darkness and barely visible in many spots as they wave cars on to the detours. And if you don’t see them until the last minute and fail to follow their waves, sometimes they yell at you in a foreign language and give you a finger signal that is clearly understood in any language. In the mist of the morning light, motorist have to dodge all sorts of debris strewn along 17.

Residents in Lake Asbury said the county has them isolated and they’ve taken to Facebook with plenty to say!

“#FreeLakeAsbury” pleaded Samantha Nicols Wernet.

“God help us all if we get a hurricane,” worries Tera Gunter. “Because we are gonna need a helicopter to evacuate the Lake Asbury area!!!!”

“Who was on drugs when they planned that?” asked Christina Mosely.

“They gonna have to start air dropping supplies to us at some point.” Ernie Dukes observed.

Brad Satcher provided the most unapologetic and accurate description of the Lake Asbury traffic pandemonium.

“It’s all a s**tshow!”

Most of us Clay Countians are pretty smart folks. We’ve lived through the reign of elected officials that should have left office in handcuffs—not with a taxpayer-funded pension, lifetime healthcare, and a farewell party paid for by the people they swindled. So, we recognize political spackle when we see it…and we’re covered in it.

That spackle started years ago. Zoning practices in most Florida counties, including our own, was to require infrastructure to be in place before housing and business developments were allowed. But, thanks to some former commissioners and their friendships with powerful developers, we now have an open door where anyone who knows someone with a contractors’ license and a pulse can spontaneously build huge planned urban developments or retail centers that resemble small cities and with no requirements for infrastructure or roads.

Clay’s taxpayers are now stuck with the bill for developers’ whims and we are now millions over budget for the road projects.

While those who started the confusion and chaos on our roadways seem to be consulting their Ouija boards for their next road fiasco and reaching for their second Jack Daniels, we are forced to sit, not so patiently, in traffic clutching our coffee, snacks, podcasts, neck-pillows and emotional support animals.

I wish I could tell you this asphalt purgatory would end soon with a Heavenly outcome. But our county’s current construction disasters keep coming. Just as Whitey’s Fish Camp was finally freed from barricades and bulldozers, another massive project popped up half a mile down that made turning from Old Hard Road on to 220 feel like Russian Roulette.

But maybe, just maybe, there's a bright side. Maybe knowing we're all in this together might lighten our road load and offer comfort and camaraderie. Okay, or maybe not.