"The Long and Winding Road"

The fact is, I'm not generally a fan of Paul McCartney songs, at least not the later ones.  But the title works, so it was the way to go.

My mother lives in Surfside.  She's 94 1/2, and she's been rendered totally nonfunctional, because of strokes.  We have aides for her, because there's nothing she can do for herself, and I see her once or twice a week.  The most regular of those times is Sunday mornings.  I get food, I bring it over, I make coffee, and we have breakfast, for at least a little while until she wants to go back to bed/sleep.  We try to do video visits with my daughter, son-in-law, and my grandchildren (my mother's only great grandchildren), but she can't pay much attention, and she can't hear what people say to her.  But it's part of my ritual.  She knows who I am, and every indicator I have is that these visits are important to her.

Normally, I go down to the 79th St causeway to go to Miami Beach (because I resent that Bay Harbor Islands didn't take away the toll as they said decades ago they would -- they increased it), and then, I come north on Collins to Surfside.  But last Sunday, I already knew that wasn't going to work.  I (rightly) assumed the streets would be closed because of the building that collapsed on Collins at 87th St.  So I had to work my way around some other way.  I was trying to get to 88th St and Abbott Avenue.  It wasn't easy.

Many streets have long been closed or capped, and egresses from them, like the southern end of Abbott Avenue, are one way at the end (not the one way I needed for half a block), and you have to turn.  I had to go a different way, and many blocks out of my way, to work my way north of 89th St, and then south on Abbott.  There were several avenues I couldn't take north, because there were no turns into those avenues.

The Town of Surfside did this years ago, because they didn't want people driving -- or "cutting" -- through Surfside streets, on their way north from Miami Beach, or south from BHI or Bal Harbour.  It's made a mess of trying simply to get from one place to another.  And it's no easier for residents of Surfside.  If you want to go south, you can really only do this by going to Harding.  If you want to go north, you need to get to Collins.

In the past, there have been partial and temporary movements to do a similar thing, for the same reason, in BP.  Fortunately for us, and everyone else, these little crusades generally peter out without any action taken.  About a year ago, we had another version, and this one proposed changing the character, capacity, and rhythm of 6th Avenue.

These are public streets, with "public" meaning everyone.  If people don't want to live in Surfside, then they should live on Indian Creek Island.  If people don't want to live on open BP streets, or on the one with four lanes and a 30 MPH speed limit, then they should live in culs-de-sac.  I know Indian Creek Island is more expensive than Surfside, and a cul-de-sac is more expensive than 6th  Avenue.  But if that's what you want, then go live there.  Don't make your fiscal limitations everyone else's problem.