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Thursday, July 27, 2006
How has development inconvenienced you?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Note to readers: Bill Allen’s blog will return soon.
Life in Duluth has come full circle for me of late.
My first blog with the AJC told of my Russian friend getting lost on 120 because of all of the name changes it undergoes. My second blog was about a computer virus that viciously attacked my computer. My third (or is it fourth? My memory ain’t what it used to be) relayed a complaint that some of you had expressed to me about traffic and how development in Duluth was getting out of hand.
I got to revisit all of these subjects this past weekend.
Last Friday, my Russian friend called me in a panic. She had a virus on her computer. A pop-up window kept appearing every time she was in the middle of doing something, shutting her computer down. Could I go over and help her? Eager to demonstrate my technological prowess (and thinking that I had better pull this off or I was in deep doo-doo), I went to her house to play Bill Gates for a while.
She lives in a subdivision just off of Pleasant Hill Road near Buford Highway where they are putting in the new interchange ramps. The DOT completely blocked off the original entrance to her subdivision, moved it down a couple of hundred yards, and erected a traffic light so that she (and her neighbors) have better access (though there are no signs nor street lights to mark the change, adding to the confusion of it all). I got to her house, cracked my knuckles, and went to work. After two hours, I had not only fixed the problem but also fixed several others. I was so proud of myself that I pulled a tendon in my elbow patting myself on the back.
She thanked me by taking me to a movie the next night. We went to see “RV” at Venture Mall, the 99-cent cinema ($1.99 after 6:00. We are both cheap, so this worked out well for us). The last time I had been there, the mall was virtually empty. All of the stores had been vacated. I thought at the time (and still do) that overdevelopment drove everyone away, that it was too hard to get in and out of there (I avoid that area like the plague when possible because of this. It’s not uncommon to take 45 minutes to travel the half-mile on Pleasant Hill from Satellite to I-85). There were new stores, however, and the parking lot was full. The joint was jumping.
Usually when I am in that neck of the woods, I will bypass Pleasant Hill via Steve Reynolds Blvd. Most times it’s a lesser of two evils, but there are times when it offers little or no relief. Saturday proved to be a good night, as we made it from her house to the movie theater in 15 minutes (pretty darn good for a Saturday night, if you ask me).
Leaving the place, however, was a different matter. Too many people were trying to get back onto Venture Drive at the same time. There was no point turning left to get back to Steve Reynolds, we’d be there forever. So, I turned right, knowing that there was a traffic light at the intersection of Venture and Pleasant Hill. I would just turn left onto Pleasant Hill and deal with it.
Except that you can’t turn left at that traffic light any more. Used to be able to, but not any more. I didn’t know that. The first painted arrow on Venture as you approach Pleasant Hill showed that you could turn left, but subsequent arrows showed either going straight or right. I couldn’t go straight – people had the intersection blocked (par for the course), and I couldn’t make a U-turn. So, we found ourselves headed to I-85. As I was getting onto Pleasant Hill, my Russian friend said, “Oh, I have been here before. You turn left on to 85 and then you end up going to 316 because no one will let you over.” Déjà vu.
Long story short, we did in fact end up going up 85, but I showed her how to get to 120 from there, and we had a good conversation recalling our previous conversation about getting lost once she realized where we were, and how her adventure had started my work here with the AJC. Her computer is still working, and traffic on Pleasant Hill is still awful. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
How has development inconvenienced you?
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