Ocean view from a restaurant in Delray Beach, Florida. Note the generous HCP parking space and the smoothness of the road surface. Photo: Eric Levin
I just got back from a week’s vacation, where I was assiduously researching a freelance story on public golf in Palm Beach County, Florida. I put 350 miles on a rental car.
Here are some of the observations I made between Jersey roads and those of Palm Beach County.
(To give you an idea of size and density, Palm Beach County covers 2,386 square miles, roughly the size of all of New Jersey north of I-78. It is is the third most populous county in Florida, yet about the same number of people live there as are packed into Essex and Union Counties alone. For important footnote, see *, below)
Now to the comparo….
- POTHOLES
NJ: I hardly need tell you how over-endowed with them we are (see Breanne McCarthy’s Pothole Purgatory)
PB: Not one in 350 miles. One big reason? No brutal freeze-thaw cycle like we have. It’s smooth sailing. No rough patches of tar where cracks and potholes have been filled in. - ROAD LAYOUT
NJ: Tight curves, winding roads, switchbacks, jughandles, pass the Dramamine.
PB: A vast grid of straight lines heading N-S or E-W. Turns are 90 degrees. Otherwise you are always driving in a straight line. - TOPOGRAPHY
NJ: Hills, some gentle, some steep; sudden dips and crests; pancake flat only in the Pinelands and the lower Shore
PB: Flat as far as the eye can see, which is not far because…everything is flat. - HIGHWAY TERMINOLOGY
NJ: We know from the whole Which Exit? shtick, also Interstates, meandering country roads dense with traffic (US 202, US 206) and fright fests like the commercial parts of Route 22.
PB: Picture this: Three or four lanes of traffic in each direction, going on for miles, occasionally meeting a set of traffic lights for 90-degree turns onto similar thoroughfares. We would call these highways (like the way the Parkway peters out its last few southern miles). In PB County, they are roads, avenues or boulevards.
Example: Okeechobee Boulevard, a major E-W drag. At every intersection the road seems to widen, or maybe the median narrows, so in addition to the three or four lanes of traffic there is both a separate right-turn-on-red lane and a separate left turn lane (or even two dedicated left-turn lanes) which gets its own left-turn-only light.
These intersections are very orderly, also interminable. By the time one of these lights turned green, I had forgotten not only where I was going but what day it was.
Seen from the 6th tee of the North Palm Beach Country Club (a public course), a yacht approaches the infernal drawbridge. Traffic stops while it slowly crosses the inlet to the ocean. Photo: Eric Levin
- DRAWBRIDGES
NJ: At last a win for the Garden State! We have very few drawbridges left.
PB: Blame the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW), a combination of natural and man-made canals, rivers and inlets that parallel the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. On the Atlantic Coast, the ICW separates Palm Beach, Singer Island, etc., from the mainland.
I encountered a few drawbridges, mainly on N-S roads. These made boulevard red lights seem like eye blinks.
What’s galling about the wait, aside from fretting the minutes ticking away (a very Jersey trait, I admit), is that what you are waiting for is a single master-of-the-universe’s motor yacht to pass under the bridge.
Doubly galling is that the yacht itself would probably fit under these bridges but for the height of its radar and antenna masts, which force the roadways to lift (in a motion that feels like bowing down though in the opposite direction). Meanwhile, traffic back ups for a quarter-mile or more in each direction.
When those mast tips slowwwwwwly cruise by, you get a new sense of the term sticking it to you. - LANDMARKS
NJ: Another win for the Garden State? From lovely to laughable, we’ve got them, and they help you find your way.
PB: Yes, from the mainland, you can look across the ICW and see the palatial old Breakers Hotel on the beach. But the biggest landmarks are the high-rise apartment buildings, which stand in almost unbroken phalanxes up and down the county’s coast. Problem is they all look the same. And if giving directions in Palm Beach County, never say “Turn right at the big Walgreens on the corner.” There’s a big Walgreens on almost every corner, except corners where there is a big CVS.*Actually most of Palm Beach County is protected wetlands, the huge Lake Okeechobee and other stuff that turns up on satellite maps as undifferentiated dark green. The population mainly occupies the narrow N-S sliver between Jupiter and Delray Beach. So there is some congestion in Palm Beach County, after all. Great place to be a lowercase ‘gator, though, not the uppercase U of F kind whose universe is centered far to the north in Gainesville.
