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I have come to the conclusion that if you want to live on St. Simons Island you need to learn to live with the traffic. If you are going to complain, please, please, please do not move here. Do your due diligence first.
You do have options besides your car. You can bike. You can walk. You cannot drive a golf cart except in your neighborhood or on a golf course. You can plan – heaven forbid – and leave a bit early for an appointment or work in case you run into traffic. I know. Sometimes leaving early doesn’t help.
You can drive slower on the causeway. (Who said that?) You can leave the proper amount of space between you and the car in front of you. Don’t weave in and out of traffic. All stuff learned in high school drivers education class. Pay attention to the other drivers on the road. I stay away from maniac drivers. I do not drive in clots of traffic. I don’t drive right next to a vehicle if at all possible.
I have come to the conclusion that beaucoup roundabouts won’t matter. Tourists don’t know how to drive in them. Heck – many residents don’t know how to drive in them.
We could save a lot of money not building roundabouts. They are difficult for emergency vehicles and large trucks to negotiate.
Without a roundabout you might wait through a red light or two. Big deal. Take a deep breath. Can’t believe I am saying this since impatience is my middle name, but a wait at a red light or on the causeway behind an accident is moments out of your life. Listen to music. Plan your weekend. Chat with a friend.
The hard truth is very little, if any planning, was done for St. Simons in the way of infrastructure or zoning or planning. Building on St. Simons kind of evolved in a haphazard way. Plus people want to live on the island and many don’t care if their house is next to or behind a convenience store.
Look at the curb cuts in front of Longview Shopping Center. Insanity. Look at the curb cuts along Demere Road from Sea Island Road to the roundabout at Demere and Frederica Rd. Consider the fun driving north on Frederica Rd. from Sea Island Road just to Atlantic. Or vice versa. It’s a challenge. What engineer allowed that? To make the fun more fun – a fire station was thrown in.
A project is approved and we try to catch up with the infrastructure. Seems the wrong way around to me. Space is limited and at a premium on the island.
I guess my favorite local traffic challenge is turning left or west out of the marina onto the causeway. Say a prayer and floor it. Turning right or east ain’t no picnic either. I guess someone somewhere said let’s build some condos, office buildings and retail in the most inconvenient possible place. It wasn’t so bad in the early years, but no one planned for a four lane causeway, boulders down the middle of the causeway or traffic growth.
“They” say the roundabout on the island end of the causeway will slow the traffic coming on to the island and make things safer. My vision is traffic backing up to Brunswick during “rush hour.” But what do I know.
