Every time I start wondering why I’m foolish enough to dream of moving far from here, I’m reminded by a zombie bum fight in the middle of the road in a blinding rain that maybe it’d be more than just a regrettably useless change of scenery.
One was throwing construction barricades at the other, both next to the only lane out of town.
gave up waiting in line to get out of the county tonight and went to visit one of my beasts. at least there are sometimes productive things to do when the roads fail.
I’ll take a silly tube rig that likes sending me on tuning wild goose chases over four hours of traffuck…..
One lane out tonight. Again. This is the face of South Florida 😉
For over a year I’d been trying to rent a storage unit to stash some of my equipment in when not in use. I had no luck for a very long time– every offering I found was either over $300 a month and/or required an astronomically large deposit and a yearly contract. Finally one place I’d gotten on a waiting list with eight months ago had a unit available and it was surprisingly affordable, especially for a climate controlled facility, even after the $10 a month extra fee for the 24 hour access they never disclose anywhere as requiring an extra fee!
It’s built in and around the site of a former large bakery, which left South Florida due to a necessity to consolidate and the exorbitant costs of producing their goods here.
It now houses a large number of climate controlled storage units in the old bakery building and some additional ones in outbuildings, as well as a maintenance facility for rental trucks.
Of course there’s gotta be a reason it’s so cheap, and that’s that it is nearly impossible to access.
Access to the facility is only possible via one road, in one direction, which in turn is only accessible via one small isolated industrial district. During the day, that’s a two hour queue to get in and another half hour to get back out.
At night, it’s perfectly fine…. Until they suffered the Truckwall infection.
A tow truck driver collected the shattered remains of one of the company’s rental trucks from what looks to have been a pretty severe crash. The whole front of the pickup was smashed in and the cab appeared to have been cut open to rescue the occupants. The tow truck driver came in and dropped it…. right in front of the only access gate to the storage facility.
I came up trying to get in as he was filling out his paperwork and asked if he had to leave the truck there or if he could move it a few feet away from the gate to restore access (if anyone is inside the facility right now, they’re trapped as well!!)
He told me that he would…… If I gave him $150 in cash within the next ten minutes. Otherwise he’d just leave.
OOPS! YOUR STORAGE HAS BEEN BLOCKED BY TRUCKWALL!!!
I gave up and left after calling the city’s police department, who outright refused to send anyone.
There are just some things you have to, sadly, come to live with as a fact of life in South Florida, and one of them is that you sometimes you’ll find yourself locked out of where you want to go due to road based stupidity.
Infection resolved!
As I feared, TruckWall had trapped users of the facility. One of them had a large pickup truck with bull bars on the front. TruckWall’s payload was shoved back from the gate…. with slightly more damage than it had originally.
This blog is full of me shouting down a hole about how badly South Florida sucks.
But why’d this come to be? What happened to this beautiful tropical oasis?
Here are some theories.
What it looks like under the hood when you’re trafFUCKED:
A few years ago, I met a guy who came down here to South Florida after graduating with a master’s degree in community planning.
He could not find a job in Southeast Florida at all, because no planning exists. “Communities” do not exist. What exists is just spray and pray.
Here’s what’s making me mad due to its total illogic and general idiocy.
American [Wet] Dream Miami has not died, sadly. The developers are on board and Miami-Dade County, seeking a new economic engine to the region, is pushing for it to get built as soon as possible.
The State of Florida doesn’t think it’s going to work and may step in to stop it, as they realize the critical lack of transportation and other infrastructure to support the project. Broward County looks on horrified yet powerless to stop it, like a damsel in distress.
Speaking of damsels in distress, let me digress a moment and share with you one of the fucking creepiest ad campaigns I’ve ever seen:
This shit makes me cringe so hard in so many ways, but— I’m not one to speak, I’m just the engineer.
So, since the last time I’ve yelled obscenities at the wall about this thing, they’ve released some informative graphics on the project:
The Graham Project is just fucking stupid. Do you really want to live there and find yourself locked up in 1-5 hours of traffic just to get to anything as common as a full sized grocery store? Great! You’ll love this place. The only planned access appears to be by the feeder roads to the mall.
Sprawl kings Lennar Homes also want to shit out another development over protected wetlands to the south of the Graham Project.
And now, site leasing plans revealing an interior floor plan!
The ski slope looks like a robot dick. I’m sorry. It does. There’s no denying that.
And now, here is why this shit will fail and fail hard.
Miami-Dade County’s economy has been in a meltdown since the mid 1990s that is now almost complete. Miami’s got effectively two classes: The rich, who either come from old money, own big foreign corporations…. and those who attempt to make a living working in what businesses are left in Miami-Dade County, or— the flat broke.
Studies have shown that Miami is one of the least affordable cities to live in (or around). Rental housing? Forget it. You pretty much need to be ready to buy a property to live in Miami-Dade County, and you need to be ready to buy that in cash, because you will be competing with foreign cash buyers for that property who just want to sit on it to pad their portfolio with some crap houses that keep a more or less stable value.
Nobody who is going to work in this shit show will be able to afford to live in Miami-Dade County.
Nobody who is going to work in this shit show will be able to afford the time and expenses to commute from anywhere that housing still remains affordable.
And, most importantly:
RETAIL IS DEAD. DEAD. DEAD AS FUCK. STICK A FORK IN IT, IT IS FUCKING DONE.
Yes, I realize the alternate use of this little fuckball is that it contains a half assed “theme park” and water park in its two large open spaces, in addition to what appears to be a specially constructed lake where you can… go fishing?? I don’t get it. Also, where’s the water coming from? If you’ve seen my previous posts on this cocksplat of a plan, I’ve brought up the question of where they’re going to get water. Florida is in drought again this spring, and we haven’t seen the worst of it yet. I hope you’re ready to deal with begging for sustenance from the Department of Water and Power. 😉
FUUUUCK THIS NOISE.
Triple Five group made a half assed promise to run shuttle service between several existing transit hubs to alleviate the congestion. That… just won’t do a thing. They would have likely run shuttles anyway for tourists – Dolphin Mall and Sawgrass Mills have had airport shuttles for years. They transport a few dozen shoppers back and forth a day and that’s about it.
God damn it. I’m not even done here, because the idiots over at Mana Wynwood decided to dig the area a nice posh grave lined in million dollar velvet and bury it. What is Wynwood? Wynwood is an old warehouse/business district that attracted an artists’ scene because it was a good place to find affordable studio space and host some events. Unfortunately, well—
If you’re a Miami native, please try to jog your frame of mind and look at this like an outsider to see how fucking ridiculous it is–
The site of an abandoned RC Cola factory managed to become the preferred site for music festivals and performances. It’s all outdoor – in Florida – no climate control, not even a proper toilet. And now… everything around the abandoned RC Cola plant is HOT SHIT. Just like what’s inside the RC Cola Plant’s portapotties.
So now the plan is, redevelop this area with high density luxury housing, multi-million dollar condos, and high end designer retail that nobody will be able to afford to shop at. Also, the buzzwords “trade center” were thrown out there, but look at every other “trade center” project that’s been attempted in Miami. The “trade center” never materializes and all winds up being “empty-ass class C office space” or ballrooms or other under-utilized shit.
What in the actual fuck are you thinking? This is like Brickell City Centre run through a few funhouse mirrors. Unlike the Brickell City Centre, it doesn’t connect to Metromover, so there’s no easy way to just stroll right on in there.
This isn’t … gentrification. This is just plain dropping a Daisy Cutter on the neighborhood and telling everyone fuckety bye. So much for that art community that drew everyone to the area – this will surely make the spaces they work in more valuable as valet parking spots than studios. Oopsie! I’d heard rumblings that there was an effort to provide artists new spaces over in Opa-Locka before everyone just runs out of money and leaves forever, but that’s… Opa-Locka… and safely preparing that space for new use will probably require actual Daisy Cutters.
So previously I’d also questioned the redevelopment of two sites in Broward – the old Plantation Fashion Mall site and the old Boomer’s Dania– those… those seem almost… well designed in comparison. Both are infill developments slated to be mixed use with janky condominium housing and very limited road access. But at least… at least they have road access… and aren’t expected to be quite the same sort of massive overload on the surrounding areas.
Holy shit, nobody has even a sixty fourth of a fucking clue here.
See image. This is all you need to know. Contact your state senator and tell them to support SB 250.
I always loved that Eye On Miami never seemed to forget that we have a little traffic problem down here and that our leaders needed to be reminded about it and reminded to please act in the public interest….
But then this horrible orange thing happened and they got distracted by that and we don’t have our trains yet…
Aaaaand tonight, this happened.
This is the fastest route home that Waze could give me.
The beginning is in North Bay Village. The end is in Hallandale. They are about 15 miles apart.
Unfortunately there were simply no usable routes remaining and the first thing it found was US 41, State Road 29, and Alligator Alley.
Hey, at least I got to see two panthers at one point while going through Big Cypress….
I’m so very very DONE and so are your chances of ever getting anywhere on the roads in northwest Miami-Dade in 2020. I had heard nothing but radio silence on this project for over a year, and this is probably why– they were trying hard to apply decorative wallpaper to an elephant in the room to conceal it.
“It is unlikely that all needed interchange improvements will be approved and constructed by 2020, the build out year for ADM,” Lisa Colmenares, a state transportation planner for South Florida, wrote in a Nov. 23 letter to Miami-Dade. “If any of the interchange improvements fail to be approved … by 2020, the base transportation network that is the foundation of [the county’s] traffic analysis will be invalid.”
They don’t even know—–
Here’s its likeness in cable nightmare form.