We Should Probably Pave "Paradise," and Not to Put Up a Parking Lot.

It turns out we have a few problems that we can correct with one solution.

This morning, I watched a car drive over a median, so that instead of driving a half block to an opportunity to make a U-turn, the driver could just much more directly enter the lane that goes in the desired direction.  The people who live in a house more or less across the street from me do this all the time.  And lots of people use the medians for temporary parking.

Also, the medians look terrible.  There's a disorganized collection of mismatched trees, and no understory.  What's beneath the trees is irregular patches of various kinds of grass, weeds, and raw dirt.  No self-respecting municipality would ever tolerate foliage like this.

And our streets are very narrow.  When there's a mail truck, or a lawn service truck, or a (Sc)Amazon truck, they stop in the street, and drivers behind them have to drive on the medians to get by.

So maybe the answer is just to pave the medians.  We'll officially make them into what they get used for, and stop pretending they're what the name is supposed to suggest.  They look awful anyway, so it's really no loss if we replace the irregular patches of various kinds of grass, weeds, and raw dirt with macadam.  If we want to, we can keep the trees, so we can continue to pretend we're a "Tree City USA," and that we care about taller foliage.  No real municipality would have a tree arrangement like this, but we're not a real municipality.  We've even had some recent Commissioners who have called that spade the spade that it is, and lobbied for us to unincorporate, on the theory that Miami Shores, for example, would absorb us.  As if Miami Shores would want this, and us.  Why would Miami Shores want a place, and people, who are as un-self-respecting as we are?