Many residents commute from Mount Dora to work elsewhere. Will the Wekiva Parkway make that daily job better or worse for us?

1.

Last Sunday night when the idea for this story came to me, storms were racing across Central Florida, waking us at 2 a.m. to the sound of thunder and thrashing trees. For a moment it felt like sitting in the bleachers of the Daytona Speedway with motor hell about to descend.

This is a dangerous time of the year for deep-night storms, and El Nino is adding its own octane to the mix. So far, the tornado season we’ve been warned about has been quiet. The only tremor was a front that came through in mid-January that washed us out and caused a tornado to touch down in Sarasota, killing two in a mobile home.

Back in 1998 during the last big El Nino season, twelve twisters ripped through Central Florida, killing 42 and damaging thousands of homes: But this one just rumbled through and was gone, headed eventually offshore into the great black void of  the nightside Atlantic.

On the road the next morning for my daily commute to Orlando, the back end of the front was a surly smudge to the south of the brightening sky. Traffic at 6 a.m. was already heavy and there was a long line waiting to join the 429 at the Zellwood entrance. I used to get on there, but in its present design, both entrance and exit act as bottleneck for traffic itching to get somewhere fast. The first two miles of that stretch too often resembles the pack at Daytona, going crazy fast with too little room between each other. Open only for a couple years, the 429 already feels maxed out at rush hour.

Maybe, once the leg of the Wekiva Parkway from Zellwood to Mount Dora is completed, there won’t be such a jam here. But I wonder.  Something about this toll road feels late and ludicrous.

For us commuters, so far these big new roads are a mixed blessing.

2.

In 20 years, I’ve driven 130,000 miles and spent 10,400 hours in my daily commute to work. Call me a Mount Dora road warrior. Before the 414 (Maitland) extension of the 429 (also known as the Apopka Bypass, as well as the John Land Apopka Expressway) was completed in 2009, my Orlando commute was 441 all the way, straight through the Apopka bottleneck and down through dozens of traffic lights into Orlando. At rush hour, the line waiting to get through the light at Clarcona-Apopka road was often a half-mile long. (It’s not much better now.)

However, I’ve never felt it was that bad a commute, given the distance. 441 isn’t anywhere as impacted as  I-4 or 17-92, those arterials jammed with traffic from Volusia and Seminole Counties headed into Orlando. My wife and I looked at homes in Sanford before deciding on Mount Dora, and one of the determining factors was that commute.  From Mount Dora, I can drive to my job in about 50 minutes, a little more than an hour when traffic is really heavy. People elsewhere in Central drive a lot longer than that to get to work, and grind their teeth a lot harder as they endure the driving there.

Still, it’s a much longer slog than I’ve ever thought I’d have to make to get to a job. Housing was cheap in Mount Dora back in the mid-’90s, and my new wife really wanted an older house.  The better paying jobs were—are—in Orlando.  Commuting was the necessary sacrifice for living here.

Before we moved up here and got married,  I used to live in downtown Orlando, six blocks away from the newspaper where I used to work. My commute back then was a leisurely walk through old established neighborhoods. Twenty minutes of my day used to be spent in transit to and from work; now I spend two hours daily in traffic.

Mount Dora’s charms are still strong enough to make the commute worth it. It doesn’t hurt, either that  Orlando is building up so fast and loud and expensive.  Who’d want to live there?

Unfortunately, by the time substantial employment is supposed come to this area via the Innovation District—freeing me, perhaps, of that commute— I will probably be retired.

So like it or not, me and 25 miles of roads will remain married for the rest of my career.

3.

NASCAR’s 2016 season starts up this Sunday with the Daytona 500. Although it’s still called America’s Race, enthusiasm for stock car racing has waned considerably since the heyday of Dale Earnhardt. Attendance figures haven’t been released for the Daytona 500 since 2012. Television viewership continues to drop, too. The league has tried to make the season more competitive and exciting—the Chase, for example, now puts more emphasis on wins than points earned—but nothing yet is luring the fans back.

Daytona Speedway just finished a $400 million renovation at the track, replacing some 101,000 seats (wider now for fatter butts) and putting in escalators for getting up to the nosebleed sections and a vast array of luxury boxes and accouterments. NASCAR is doing everything it can to make going to races more fun for fans. And although low gas prices should be making racing more of a defiant celebration that it is, the one thing not renovated—the spiraling cost of tickets—may sufficiently douse the Viagra effects of a jazzier track.

On February 13, at a preliminary event for the 500 re-re-re-re-named Sprint Unlimited, the Speedway was a litter-whipped ghost town, with only 10,000 fans showing up to cheer six crashes and ten wrecks – which cost about $2.5 million to the owners. Denny Hamlin took the checkered flag and a check for $198,475; pole-winner Jimmie Johnson, the six-time Sprint Cup winner, crashed in Lap 43, finished 22d and ended up with what amounts to beer money these days, $24,450. A third of the drivers in the race also crashed.  Johnson has been exceptionally unlucky in past runnings of what is now called the Unlimited, crashing out in the last four straight. Afterward, he was philosophical. “I don’t want any luck in this one,” he said. “I want it all next Sunday.” (In 2013 Johnson won the Daytona 500 and picked up a check for $1.5 million.)

I used to follow racing. Back in 2010 I edited a blog called NASCAR This Week, featuring the writings of Monte Dutton, who was back then one of the great motorsports journalists in the country. He worked for a daily paper in Gaston, Gazette. That year I even went to a couple of races—the Bud Shootout (now the Sprint Unlimited), and the summer race, back then the Coke Zero 400.

I remember the explosive sound of those cars going around at 180 miles per hour; in a pack, the collective howl could loosen molars. It’s easy to see where our American need for speed comes from, and why speed cathedrals like Daytona were built.  But racing is a fading American religion, shadowed by the specter of fossil-fuel induced global, popular mostly among diehard older fans. Racing as a sport may be destined to disappear, along print newspapers and other victims of the digital age.

It doesn’t help that each year racing becomes safer and tamer; duller and more expensive, too. Back in Dale Earnhardt’s day, racing had a dangerous edge to it. Its heroes were hell-raisers. Earnhardt drove without a seatbelt right up until the 2001 Daytona 500’s final lap when he crashed into a retaining wall.

The Intimidator met The Eliminator, NASCAR took a deep breath and the game was recalibrated. The first thing drivers were required to wear were those seatbelts, followed by the HANS head restraint. The Car of the Future, introduced for NASCAR cup racing in 2007, was such a safe car that at the end of the 2013 spring Talladega race, driver Carl Edwards’ car went airborne, flipped over, nearly cleared the 20-foot-high catchfence protecting fans, then came back down in a flaming crash. And because stock cars are so safe now, Edwards was able to get out of that impossible wreck and jog to the finish line, as Ricky Bobby and his archrival Jean Girard did in the 2006 movie Talladega Nights.

Maybe when drivers became invincible, races lost the ability to thrill.

For the wives and kids and family members of those drivers, though, every added safety feature helps them sleep that much better every night. NASCAR wives are different these days, too; now there’s even Danica Patrick, a girl out there racing with the boys.

4.

After all these years of commuting to Orlando, I’ve only had one wreck. (Knock on wood.) But I have seen plenty of accidents en route. Some insane ones, too, like the Miata convertible that wedged beneath a semi when it turned left from oncoming traffic on 441. Or when, just north of Zellwood, a trash hauler jacknifed, spilling a neighborhood’s worth of construction debris across the median. And, though the wrecks get hauled away soon enough so traffic can resume its hair-raising pace, the skid-marks linger a long while afterward as grim reminders of the cost of commuting, ever reminding us to slow down, take care. Nobody seems to remember that a mile past the wreckage.

Accident slowdowns are more due to drivers stopping to gawk at wreckage; it’s amazing how fast things get back up to speed once they’ve taken it in. Maybe racin’ is like football, a way to delve into controlled ultraviolence without taking any real hits. Watching wrecks without getting into any. Spectating from a safe distance from the track, on the bleachers or watching it all on TV from the comfort of one’s living room.

When I went to the Bud Shootout in 2010, I met up with Monte Dutton for a while between the ARCA race and the main event. He sure had some funny stories about drivers from back in the day, but even then his enthusiasm for what racing was becoming was on the wane. Eventually, he headed back up to the press box and I made my way up the dizzy upward staircases to the grandstands where fans were getting good and drunk for the main event. (I’ve always wondered how many drunk driving arrests there are typically on International Speedway Drive after a race.)  And although it had been sunny and in the 60s that afternoon for the ARCA race, by nightfall it turned cold fast—colder, it seemed, with every lap.

Way up toward the top benches you can get a great view of things, watching the pack zoom around the turns and straightaway on the other side of the 2-1/2 mile course and then head back. But it’s down close to the track that the rock ‘n’ roll happens. The pack ferals around Turn 4, and then there’s a weird pause of wild silence, like a breath quietly indrawn: And then the pack roars down the straightaway, each car yowling past in a flash, going so fast you only get a glimpse, a tiny moment to triangulate just what’s going on, who’s in the lead before the whole pack is gone, leaping ahead down the stretch and into the turn.

Imagine an F-14 fighter jet flying around in high school gym and you grasp the physical menace of the pack on the straightaway barreling toward the finish.

Watching a race live, the wrecks still happen faster than the eye can take in; they have this nightmarish quick-slowness that freezes the brain somehow, burning the moment of cataclysm in.  It is hard to know just what you have seen. Thankfully, there’s instant replay the big videotron screen. And or YouTube, you can watch the clips over and over and over.

Some wrecks are immortal.

5.

Once a week in my commute I can count on a harrowing sight— a cat or dog or possum or raccoon smashed into so much hamburger in the middle of the pavement or ballooning by the side of the road in Florida’s swelter. (The cats always break my heart.)

Sometimes there’s a car in a ditch or upside down in the median or some daisy-chain of cars caught up in the same bad move.

Or a new roadside memorial, placed there  after the Angel flew off his scythe.

By the next day, the corpses and the wrecks our furious commotion between here and there have been cleaned away.

But the roadside memorials take months to disappear. Sometimes years.

6.

On January 20, the first leg of the Wekiva Parkway opened, a $28 million, 3.14-mile stretch linking County Road 435 (Mount Plymouth Road) north of Hass Road, to State Road 46 east of Camp Challenge Road. (According to the Florida Department of Transportation, this leg was finished first because it had already acquired all of the needed property.) Way east of 441, the 429 is supposed to travel north from the Zellwood exit and then fork, with one arm headed up to Mount Dora, and the other cutting across east to join up with 46 to the east of Mt. Plymouth. This stretch of toll road is the first to feature electronic tolling—no toll booth operators. (You won’t be able to drive it legally without a transponder.)

When its done in 2021—five years from now—the  $1.6 billion road project will link the major toll arteries on the east and west sides of Orlando at a location just few miles east of Mount Dora.

The real boon for the city (and all of north Lake County) will come when the 1,300-acre Innovation District is built all around the Mount Dora exit of the Wekiva Parkway, bringing with it a heady mix of employers. However, there are still a lot of ‘if’s’ ahead in achieving the original vision.

Until that time when (and If) the Innovation District completes, all of that promise for now means traffic snarls for the area as road construction projects grind out.

Commuters beware.

Some may remember 441 widening projects back in the ’90s, how for a long while A to B in Lake County meant headaches and how. And if that is too long ago for some commuters to recall, consider then the current I-4 widening project in Orlando. The six-year, $2.3 billion dollar improvement project will span 21 miles, and when it’s done, engineers will then head to Phase 2 in 2012 upgrading 40 more miles of I-4 corridors to the north and south of Orlando. Along the way, exits have closed, new bridges built, lanes diverted and traffic flows changed daily as 220,000 cars and trucks chug-a-lug through.

Make no bones about it — what Orlando is aggrieved by now is coming soon to Mount Dora. Highway work for the Wekiva Parkway will involve significant construction and road widening projects from SR-44 to SR-46 (including rebuilding the 441-46 interchange).  Following that will be the project all the way out 46 to the Parkway, just beyond Round Lake Road. Mount Dora will spend this year just getting ready for construction, with all the needed utilities relocation. The construction projects begin in 2017 and complete in 2021.

At the far of all that road construction is the opening of the Wekiva Parkway, where traffic coming up from the east and west sides of Orlando will join in one arterial spurt into Mount Dora and points to the north-east corner of Lake County. Commuters headed from Mount Dora toward Orlando may elect to drive several miles east to the Wekiva Parkway to gain toll road access to Orlando, but that may not be that much of a time-saver, overall. Depending on how much new traffic gorges onto the toll road, the old alternate of 441 all the way may become more preferable.

The thing with these changes, the shifts occur imperceptibly at first. I don’t think drivers on 441 between Mount Dora and Apopka were always as manic as they are now. Maybe they seem more so because there’s increasingly less room between cars to compensate for mistakes. Lane-weavers disturb the commuting vortex with impunity and audacity. There are more cars waiting at lights, more waiting at the turn onto the 429, more coming off in one gelatinous splat. Then a truck barreling down in the left lane doesn’t notice how far back traffic has stopped for a light and slams on the brakes, jolting our attention to the rear-view mirror with eyes as big as saucers. This time—though probably not the next—grace intervenes and no one is scratched.

As I said, I already have my doubts about the 429. Driving home, just north of the toll plaza you can see residential development on both sides of the road. Three cranes loom beyond, promising what looks like commercial development, too. Wait until those drivers hit these roads.

And just wait until the Mount Dora that has sprouted up all around the coming Innovation District decides it’s time to hit the road, jack.

It would be funny–ironic— if, after all the roadwork to come, with all that spanking-new highway, we commuters end up chasing our daily dollar exactly the way we did ten years ago.

No wonder they call it a rat race.

7.

I’ve driven through hellish conditions in my commute. The worst is when summer thunderstorms whip through, blowing rain almost sideways. No matter how much you slow down, driving  still feels like a dangerous careen. I’ve driven in fog so think you can’t see the car ahead, as well as straight into the shrieking blare of the sun just so above the horizon.  I’ve been nailed by hail, gotten lost in brushfire smoke. Once in the middle of a storm I drove through standing water that climbed up over my car’s hood.  it’s been so hot I’ve wondered why my car’s tires didn’t melt into sludge.

There have been those moments when I wondered if I would make it home.

Once my car broke down the way home, a mile from the Old 441 exit into Mount Dora. I was nearly almost home, but that easy 25- mile distance became something else in stop-time, when I had to wait an hour for the wrecker and then walked home. It took me as long to walk that last mile as it does to drive the entire span.

Surviving life on Earth as homo sapiens has always meant mastering the elements. Of raising tolerances, it’s what we do. Cro-Magnons thrived in Ice-Age Europe because they learned to throw spears a little further than Neanderthals. The steam engine and telegraph betrayed America’s forbidding distances. Roads were built and the country moved. Vacationers came down US-441—what is also called the Orange Blossom Trail—into the verdant warm of Florida, to become intoxicated by millions of acres of blooming citrus. Residents began slogging greater distances for better jobs, finding it was possible to work by day for the Mouse and still have time to get home for dinner with Dora.

Whenever there’s a challenge, usually you’ll find human standing next to it, scratching his or her head. The problem for us is that our devices become too good at what they do, creating means which tolerate no ends. Our heating climate is the blatant example. Cooked by burning petrochemicals into its present gassy finish, each barrel of oil now extracted from underground has an escalating impact on how hot  this planet will eventually burn. But with so much invested in the infrastructure, there’s no way to stop it without causing severe mayhem to our economy.

So we drive. I say that my Toyota Corolla’s 30-miles-to-the gallon gas mileage is a more earth-friendly alternative to that big yellow Hummer I pass on Grandview every morning, but who am I kidding? Millennials are learning to live without cars altogether; I’m the problem, aging out.

Of course, my aging Boomer conspiracy with planetary doom is helped a lot these days by cheap gas prices. Who needs to shell out big dough for an electric car when gas is $1.69 a gallon?  No one seems to be passing the savings around in any meaningful way. Publix hasn’t lowered food prices even though transportation costs are less than half of what they were a few years ago. I haven’t invested my gas savings into solutions like solar panels for the house.

But I think everyone gets it that while pump prices are now as low as they were in the ’70s, we’re just experiencing a fossil-fuel Indian summer. Eventually prices will soar back up, surpassing even the old record highs. There is a vast new middle class in China and India who want to drive, baby.

Driving will become painful again that way. President Obama has proposed a $10-a-barrel surcharge on the oil industry to help pay for alternative fuel sources—that will hurt at the pump. And as effects of global warming grow (and that’s happening a lot faster than anyone expected), fossil fuel existence for the likes of you and me will become an exorbitant luxury.

Five million more American relocating to the Sunshine State in the next 15 years, even  though sea levels and heat indexes for the Sunshine State are expected to soar.

Just when the Wekiva Parkway is finished and the Innovation District is rolling out a wide welcome to business and industry, it may just be too damned hot to live here, and too expensive to get here by car.

So everything that makes the driving relatively easy these days is being shadowed fast by changing weather.

But still I drive, baby, drive.

8.

in 2012, NASCAR’s brand lawyers complained that my NASCAR blog was using their name without permission, and my company’s lawyers decided just to shut us down. Like just about everyone else to this day, we hadn’t figured out how to make any money on the Internet. So what was the point? At the time we were one of the most popular racin’ blogs on the Net; but with a sigh and a press of the delete button, three years of NASCAR news and track babes and wonderfully spicy opinion vanished from cyberspace, never to be seen again.

The next year Monte Dutton’s paper was sold, and he was soon out of a job. Since then he’s written some about NASCAR while trying a second career as novelist; but the fun in motorsports reporting, he says, is largely gone. Drivers had become brands you couldn’t play golf with anymore; without the personal interaction, it’s just “journalism by media conference”—and what fun is that?

Perhaps motorsports is just another victim of digital disruption. Technology progressed fans away. Certainly the desire to sit out on cold bleachers cheering on a distant car faded when TV could offer up so many more vantage points of a race, and served to one’s own La-Z-Boy. Computer-generated simulated racing erases even more the distance between spectator and driver, putting you virtually inside the driver’s seat and helmet. When you can join a simulated racing league that exactly mirrors the NASCAR Sprint Cup schedule, how different is the real thing.

And now there’s virtual reality. Fox Sports just signed a 5-year deal with NextVR to provide an immersive, high-definition VR experience of races they broadcast.  Why go through all the trouble to watch someone else’s race when you can star in your own? That’s the essence of the communication revolution that is changing everything these days.

Real world driving—you and me in cars—is also being taken over by digital technology. Dashboards are now networked computers capable of delivering a hell of a lot of information to drivers. This leads directly to the coming revolution of  driverless cars. it’s hard to imagine what else I’d do, being driven to work by my car; images from The Jetsons keep crowding in, retro-futuristic fantasias the color of a ’50s cartoon.  Talk to my wife via video-phone? Play racing games with other bored riders?

With that disruption comes an immense amount of distraction (is anyone still reading this?). The worst example is, of course, drivers distracted from Job Number One because they’re fiddling with their digital  devices—calling, texting, emailing, gaming, whatever. It’s estimated that any given daylight moment in America, some 660,000 drivers are using cell phones or manipulating electronic devices while driving. As a result, in 2013, 3,154 people were killed and more than 387,000 were injured in motor vehicle crashes involving distracted drivers.

Ultimately, maybe the trick is to do without cars altogether. There are car-sharing or ride-sharing apps and others for trip planning, making owning a car less of a necessity. And I keep hoping that telecommunications technology will soon enough make commuting a moot need, anyway.

So what will we do with all these toll roads? Smoother sailing for truckers and vacationers, I guess.

Or maybe they too will end up as bike trails.

9.

I still work in the newspaper business and hope to finish my career in it, but I’m not sure the industry will survive that long. Digital disruption has killed print newspapers, and digital advertising is struggling to make pennies selling around the ad-blockers. Mount Dora hasn’t had a newspaper for ten years, and communities around the country are likewise losing their newspapers, every day. The core product of the company I work for is print-driven;  and while there’s still a market, it’s like a glacier slowly melting into warm Arctic waters. I don’t know if we’ll sink under the tideline before I get to claim my gold watch, but I sure hope I’ll be able to commute the distance.

Managing decline may be the nature of retirement, but surely there are jazzier things to do in life.

Here at work, none of the racin’ diehards went over for the Duels this year, that preliminary race which decides pole positions for the 500. “What’s the point?” our PC tech manager asked rhetorically. No matter; TV sets throughout the building have had been tuned in to Daytona all week, alternating with the soaps and DVD replays of “Groundhog Day” and “Die Hard.”

The street outside our offices, located a mile north of downtown, gets busier and busier as Orlando continues to build up. The scariest moment of my daily commute is when I try to pull out of our lot onto it; gaps are smaller and less frequent. Before long I may have to look for an alternate place to park, somewhere not so built over. Or find work elsewhere. Sure would be nice to work in Mount Dora and be done with all of this.

For now, I wait and wait and wait and then hit the gas, zooming out with tires screeching while someone comes up fast from one way or the other. Sometimes I get a toot of the horn or the finger; and though I don’t blame them, what else am I gonna do?

I hope I can commute for the distance, but increasingly I don’t like the getting there.

10.

When I leave every morning for work, my wife always says the same two things: I love you and Drive careful. The first statement is an affirmation of a faith, the second a reminder that affirmations aren’t just words.

America is angry these days, angrier than ever. Civility sucks just about everywhere, and nowhere are tempers being tried more than on the road where it’s everyone out for themselves. I’ve seen road-ragers go at each other side by side in their lanes, cursing and honing, weaving and waving middle fingers. No one’s been shot on my watch, but I have seen plenty Death Race 2000 moments close to the ultimate boil. We hear about them all the time now in the news.

Routinely some driver or another does something to fill my head with that bogus octane of justified rage. Happens now at least once a day: But before I hit the horn or uncork my middle finger, I try to remind myself that only the blameless get to cast first stone. I’m an asshole too, I make plenty mistakes. The busier the road, the greater the griefs.

Nowhere is the Golden Rule more of a blessing than on the road. I don’t own the roads I commute on, and no on the road is at fault but me for my wanting to get places too fast.

A long time ago, back in the Daytona 500’s earliest days, when the supertrack had just been built and Daytona racing moved from beach to track, Marshall Teague, the king of Daytona Beach racing in his Fabulous Hudson Hornet, was testing an Indy-style car—going for the speed record—when he flipped in Turn Three and was thrown, seat and all, from the car, and was killed instantly.

My wife’s nephew was killed instantly almost 20 years ago when he was driving too fast on I-95 and swerved out of control, flying off the highway and straight into a tree. Although the hood of his car actually was seen careening back across both directions of the highway, miraculously no one else was hurt.

About this time in 2007, on a night buffeted by advancing storms, my sister’s 23-year-old stepson was driving fast on the Florida Turnpike at 2 a.m. (he was headed down to Cowboys on the Orange Blossom Trail to pick up a half-sister who needed a ride), when he spun out and walloped utility pole at full speed. He, his girlfriend and best friend were all killed instantly. (Their remains were not easy to identify separately.)

I try to remember the ghosts of speed when my foot gets heavy on the pedal.

It also helps to remind myself that everyone on the road has a home they want to drive home to at the end of the day.

I  try to remember what my wife says to me before every commute. Easing off on the gas is what I Love You means to a commuter.

Often when I pull into our driveway, our calico cat is waiting for me in the window.

It’s always good to come home.

Drive Careful is not a sacred trust, but it is its own reward.

FINISH

 

David Cohea, Writer (david@mountdoracitizen.com)