I drive this area daily.
The proposed flow works only if the retail on Baymeadows is truly replaced by office/research/residential as shown in the depiction.
This area was one of the early spots slated for the BJB funding, but dropped because they couldn't get an overpass to work with out destroying access for the surrounding retail. So the depiction works, but only if the surrounding retail is replaced as shown.
As far as improving Southside in general. It has a couple of sore points in the near term.
Southside and AC Skinner. At 4:45pm Southside North backs up sometime to Old Baymeadows as a traffic control JSO officer holds the traffic to let people out of AC Skinner.
Southside and Gate Parkway. Two flows of northbound traffic come together just north of JTB and create a backup at Gate Parkway. This is caused by an aggressive signal scheme at Gate to support exiting employees of the BCBS and BAC Merrill Lynch campuses.
The report data supports this issue with the numbers they show for volumes.
The issue is more acute in the evening rush then it is in the morning. In the morning the big issue is people exiting JTB to Southside south and then trying to cross 3 lanes of traffic to turn left on AC Skinner.
Personally I stopped using Southside in the AM after I witnessed 3 accidents at Baymeadows. I use 295 East Beltway to Philips now.
I enjoyed reading about the quantity and desire for transit on Southside and I have checked my options in this space periodically. However, unless my total transit time can be reduced, it has little utility to me. 20 minute walk to the bus, and then 20 minutes on the first bus followed by a wait and bus change and then just over 25 minutes to reach my destination. Took me less time to ride 32 miles on Metra when I lived in Chicago. Driving takes me 18 minutes.
But the issues on Southside do reflect the issues with planning (or lack there of) when growing the Edge City that Lake refers to often.
Allowing large employers to build campuses with over 10k employees dump them on small arterials at the same time is a large cause. We repeated the mistake with Town Center by having Gate Parkway service not only the 3 edge city centers but also retail traffic.
When I first moved here I couldn't understand why FDOT & JTA didn't finish the bridge of Southside over Atlantic. They already own the land and could have acquired more with Houlihans torn down and Nimnicht Pontiac closed. With Regency on the wane these days, traffic at that light is not nearly what it used to be.
Southside from JTB north to Beach serves as an AM relief valve for the lousy JTB/I-95 ramps. Until FDOT and JTA can make up their mind on how they are going to configure that old rural style interchange. this route will always be an alternative.
