If you're not familiar with Gainesville, Florida, please bear with me...I've been here (except for a seven-month hiatus in 1987) for forty years and have formulated some strong opinions about the street layout here. There are some real nightmarish intersections in town, and a lot of them I find myself traveling through to get where I need to go. So the following is a list of my least favorite...or, more appropriately, most despised intersections, with the top entries being the WORST...
1 SW 34th STREET & ARCHER ROAD...If you're trying to cross this extremely large, over-congested intersection by walking, running, or bicycling, good look with that, with so many motorists refusing to obey right-of-way laws. Right now the road surface is uneven and jarring, and the northbound light on 34th sometimes lasts green for just a few seconds. Cars and trucks are notorious for running red lights here, and there have been many accidents...
2 NW 13th STREET & NW 6th STREET...NW 13th Street and NW 6th Street run parallel to each other until 6th veers west and merges into 13th a mile or two north of 39th Avenue. Cars merging in on 13th from 6th often do not yield to traffic and cars crossing left over from 13th to 6th often "jump the gun" and misjudge oncoming northbound traffic on 13th. Going down 13th northbound can be a bit stressful, and riding a bicycle in that direction is much worse as the drivers seem to be blind to my presence on the road...
3 ARCHER ROAD & SW 35th BOULEVARD...With all the businesses and apartments concentrated here, this intersection is almost always overly congested...just getting to it can be an ordeal. Ironically, I moved to this area back in 1980 to get away from the crowdedness surrounding the University of Florida campus, but it all drastically changed when a Wal-Mart was built here in 1987...
4 NEWBERRY ROAD & SW 75th STREET (TOWER ROAD)...If you're coming into Gainesville on Newberry Road from the west, you may have a long wait in store for you. The traffic here backs up so easily that I tend to go out of my way to avoid this area, usually detouring on NW 39th Avenue or SW 24th Avenue...
5 NW 34th STREET & NW 39th AVENUE...This intersection is more dangerous than frustrating. Close to home, I go through it a lot. The often heavy north-south traffic is frustrated by a too-short green traffic light, but my biggest problem is that NW 39th Avenue is a truck route and I have witnessed large semis tearing through this intersection at high speeds, running the red light. Very scary...
6 NW 43rd STREET & NW 16th BLVD/23rd AVENUE...The main problem I see here is that south of it on NW 43rd Street, the traffic builds up too much and interferes with the entering and exiting traffic from the Publix shopping center on the east side. I often see cars taking chances cutting in front of others. I'm always careful when passing by this area to look out for drivers making poor decisions...
7 NW 43rd STREET & NW 39th AVENUE...There's a similar problem to #6 here on the south side. Cars too often attempt to cross over several lanes of traffic from a nearby street, causing confusion and sometimes interfering with the flow. The lights are poorly sequenced, too. Vehicles stretching the left lead signal from 39th Avenue westbound are putting themselves directly in the pathway of those turning left from 43rd north when they get the green light, causing danger...
8 SW 34th STREET & WINDMEADOWS BOULEVARD...This intersection in of itself isn't bad; its problem rests with its close proximity to #1, lying only a few hundred feet from it. Whenever the traffic builds up...and that happens all the time...this intersection essentially shuts down and causes a logjam, with southbound cars on 34th often stuck in the middle of the intersection or trapped in lanes they can't get out off...
9 NW 34th BOULEVARD & NW 53rd AVENUE...NW 34th Blvd cuts across NW 53 Avenue at an oblique angle, making crossing this very close intersection to my house problematic...including for pedestrians. The traffic backup at busy times is horrendous, stretching down 34th Blvd as much as a half mile at times. There seems to be a larger than normal number of accidents around this intersection...
10 WEST 13th STREET & UNIVERSITY AVENUE...Originally my least favorite intersection when I moved to Gainesville many moons ago, I still try to avoid it. The intensity of the traffic at times, combined with the heavy pedestrian flow crossing the street, makes it feel more like I'm in the middle of Manhattan than in "sleepy" Gainesville...and those new hi-rise buildings on the nw side add to the effect...
I'll bet you have some of your own "favorites" if you've been around Gainesville any amount of time. But I imagine that no matter where you happen to be, there are some intersections that get under your skin the way these do mine...
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