So I moved back out to West Bay last week, home of the hour-long commutes (aside from Scooter riders). I have a few posts bubbling in Windows Live Writer that I'll probably post tonight when I get home, but I wanted to get this one out while it's still fresh in my mind and also to ping everyone who's reading this via RSS that I'm not dead and haven't stopped writing.

Monday morning I got up early, at seven, and got ready for work. Just in case, I left the house at 7:55. I came around the bend at the west end of Town Hall Road and saw red brake lights. Not good! Traffic was basically at a standstill from the Northwest Point Road fork to the four-way stop. From the four-way stop to Willie Farrington rd where Foster's Supermarket is was chock-a-block creep-and-go traffic. Once you got past that little bottleneck, traffic opened up. Now that I've done the route three times, I've seen that the traffic bottleneck IS the Willie Farrington Rd intersection and after that is smooth sailing. Coming down West Bay Road I averaged 30mph all the way through into town.

This morning I peeled off to the new bypass which comes out at the Courtyard Marriott at this point and it was practically deserted and I hit a sustained 40mph all the way through to The Strand shopping center where I pulled in for a coffee at Paperman's Coffee House. I probably could have gone faster, but the posted limit is 25mph and the road isn't finished, so if I hit a loose patch of gravel and dumped the Vespa, it would have been like landing on a cheese grater at 40mph+

The new bypass traffic backs up after the strand to the roundabout behind Lone Star, and then again where at the roundabout where it joins the Harquail Bypass, but that's because of all the cars entering the Camana Bay construction site at shift change.

If I were driving my jeep in to town at that time of the day, it would probably take me longer to get from the new apt to Foster's than it would to get from Foster's to town. My only question at this point is this: since there weren't very many cars at all on the bypass nor were there many on West Bay Road from Foster's south, why the hell was traffic backed up solid last year from NW Point Road all the way through to abuot the Hyatt???