When I most recently worked for JEA, I had to go into Headquarters in downtown Jacksonville three times per week. I dreaded those days — not for the destination, but for the journey.
Our First Coast arterial routes are clogged with accidents, congestion and construction, now more than ever and seemingly worse every day. Translated into drive time, that turned a commute from my home base in Nocatee to JEA from 35 minutes at full speed into a 60- to 75-minute slog. Six times a week.
(Thank you, Blinkist, Ezra Klein and Ira Glass, for keeping me sane coming and going those days.)
Many of you know I was born and raised in Orlando, which has its own colossal commuter headaches (and more tolled miles than I pray we’ll ever endure here). More than $2 billion in state and federal funding fed the I-4 Ultimate project, which widened and reimagined 21 miles of Central Florida’s signature freeway over seven years. And despite all that, and some pricey dynamic express lanes and picturesque bridges and archways, one still can’t glide through downtown Orlando, except perhaps after 9 p.m.
Now that I’m not making the thrice-weekly crawl to DT Jax, I’ve been blessed with some open neural pathways to think about ways we can do better. Current FDOT proposals to add one lane northbound and southbound on 95 between International Golf Parkway and DT Jax sound nice, but is that sustainable given our growth and role as gateway to Florida? Would an “Ultimate I-95” project do anything more than it did for Orlando? (Aesthetically, perhaps. I would be OK spending $2 billion if it got rid of our concrete median weeds, another post for another day.)
So all of this got me thinking about commuter rail. Back in the last decade, the Jacksonville Transportation Authority published a project proposal for First Coast Commuter Rail, an opportunity to shift some of our daily freeway blight onto fast-moving track. It’s a very engaging, convincing read, as long as you overlook some of the 2019-era development references that either happened or didn’t. I encourage you to give it a read.
The rail corridor is there and has been for decades. And developments are bubbling up, especially in St. Johns, between St. Augustine and my home base, jostling for position. How many of those future residents would gleefully curtail their car-based commutes if given the option?
Would commuter rail be a panacea? It might not directly benefit those outside the corridor (I’m thinking of you, Macclenny and Oakleaf) in terms of offering a viable mobility alternative. But take a percentage of vehicles off the roads and those same folks might gain a few mph and a modicum of sanity. Which we all know is in short supply in certain municipal circles nowadays.
And you know what they say about the definition of insanity. That might just make for a really great billboard up and down I-95, if we double down on Band-Aiding our roads and not opening our minds to better mobility solutions like commuter rail.
