"NOYB" wrote in message
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"Doug Kanter" wrote in message
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"NOYB" wrote in message
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"Doug Kanter" wrote in message
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"NOYB" wrote in message
nk.net...

"Don White" wrote in message
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NOYB wrote:

Hmmm. The Highway bill appropriated the necessary funding to widen
I-75 in Southwest Florida from 2 lanes to 3 lanes. Since most of
the working folks in Naples, Bonita Springs, Estero, and Fort Myers
have to sit in 1-2 hours of traffic on that road every morning, I'd
say that the money is hardly "wasteful pork spending".

Sounds like your traffic authorities are as backward as ours. We had
a busy secondary highway into the city widened to 3 lanes from two a
couple of years ago. They should have made it 4 lanes while they
were at it. Seems a number of commercial businesses along the stretch
didn't want the four as it would infringe on their smaller parking
lots. A lot of those went belly-up anyway and the three lane road is
already overcrowded at rush hour.

Exactly. Immokalee Road was widened from 1 lane to 2. They just
completed it in 2002. Just a couple of months ago, they started the
process of widening it to 3 lanes.

If anyone cared to do so, they should find an ambitious reporter to
look DEEPLY into that mistake. There's a good chance it was NOT a
mistake.

It's already been done. A County Commissioner, City Planning Manager,
and local developer are in jail over it.

Let me guess: It would've obviously been cheaper to go from 1 to 3 lanes,
but the contractor felt otherwise, and "convinced" the other 2 of his
views.

No. The Commissioner and City Planning Manager should have put the brakes
on the PUD's out to the East until the infrastructure caught up. Instead,
they built a road based on a 12 year old study that said 2 lanes would be
sufficient to carry the traffic load. The county did not have the money
needed to build 3 lanes without imposing the necessary impact fees on the
developer. The developer bought the county officials, and the road was
built using 2 lanes instead of 3...making it obsolete before it was
completed.

That particular area has several other problems too right now.
Environmentalists are fighting the expansion of a major north-south artery
(951) that has been on the drawing board for years. Most of the PUD's out
that way were approved under the premise that 951would have already been
built by now...but they haven't even started it yet.

It's a total cluster **** out there. To make matters worse, a Walmart
SuperCenter is weeks away from opening, and construction of a Super Target
is just getting started less than a half-mile away. To screw things up
even further, they're completely redesigning the on-off ramps from I-75 in
that area...at the same time the road widening is taking place *and* the
construction of the Walmart and Target stores (and a county park) are
going in.

Thank God I moved to an already-developed area well west of there that's
closer to the water and my office. It's 4 minutes to work now...and 7
minutes in tourist season with traffic.

When I lived out East of I-75 just last year, a 9 mile run to work was
taking me 45 minutes...and that was *before* the Walmart and Target
construction, and the Immokalee Road widening. I can't even imagine how
bad it is now...or will be once snowbird season starts in
November/December.

Like authors on the web, town officials often give the illusion of
competence, until suddenly they don't for some reason.