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| Not SRB, but it sure feels like it sometimes. |
When you visit 30A and the surrounding area in January, traffic might not be an issue. It’s a small town with a small town’s worth of population. But come in the summer or during spring break or during fall break, and you’ll find yourself sitting in traffic, along with the residents who have learned to time their outings around when the visitors might be out on the roads.
For example, do not go to the grocery store on Sundays!
As I said, it’s a small town—I use “town” for lack of a better term. Santa Rosa Beach is actually an unincorporated area of Walton County. The roads were built to accommodate several thousand people going from A to B. Now it’s a huge destination for visitors, and the full-time residential population is growing quickly, but the roadways have not necessary been adjusted for the influx.
You can widen Highway 98 all you want, adding lanes and stop lights and drainage systems (this has been an ongoing project for some time), but 30A cannot be widened, and neither can the roads that run between 30A and 98. Cram all those cars on a narrow road with few stop lights, add golf carts and pedestrians and people on bicycles leisurely crossing the street, and you get traffic. Bumper to bumper. Slow moving. Traffic.
Off this lovely road, back on 98, which is anything but lovely, you can still get bumper-to-bumper traffic. All the businesses and apartment complexes being added along this road, with quick entrance/exit lanes and impatient drivers who take risks, and you also get accidents.
My main point here, after describing the road system and the source of the bottle-necking, is to describe the nature of running regular errands. I have now mentioned twice that this is a small town. It’s a small town where most of the places you’ll need to go are not on the main road of 30A. They are on the crazy road of 98, which seems not to have been designed for the kind of development that’s being imposed upon it.
Grocery store? On 98. Post office? On 98. Doctors, dentists, pet supplies, building supplies, home goods, a light bulb? All on 98. To get to the post office, I travel up 393, a narrow north/south road and turn west onto Highway 98. The PO is not too far in that direction on the right. To leave that parking lot, I enter 98 still heading west because you can’t turn left onto the highway when not at a stop light. Then, I either exit left onto a U-turn area and hope for a break in east-bound traffic or continue to the next light, which is the far west end of 30A. Then I either make a U-turn or just meander down the beach road because it’s more pleasant, making a huge loop just to drop off a package.
Getting to the recycling drop-off area is the same. And yes, you drop off your recycling because there is no residential recycling program here. Really.
This is the nature of typical errands. There are few square turns, no road systems laid out in square blocks, hardly any simple trips required for daily living. While all of this sounds like complaining, I really am just explaining how this place works. From the long-time locals, I have heard how it hasn’t always been this way, and I am sure it’s only going to get worse as more and more development takes place, more and more people move here permanently, and more and more vacationers come here.
So, what’s it like to live here, you ask? Traffic. Expect it. Take a deep breath, and exhale.
#30A #EmeraldCoast #SantaRosaBeach
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