Number 18

The SPID is part of what's wrong with Corpus Christi. The mistake our planners and traffic engineers make is evaluating traffic with a single metric: travel times. Their focus is to move people from A to B as fast as possible. There is no consideration for the integrity and livability of our neighborhoods. A sense of community is sacrificed for a faster commute. And as traffic and traffic engineers adapt to a developing cityscape, so does that development adapt to the new traffic patterns. The city makes roads wider and faster to get from the suburbs to the business centers and now, in order to take advantage of the easier transit, the suburbs expand. Fewer people live near where they work, our city separates into arbitrary zones and our roads, especially our major thoroughfares play an increasingly larger role in our lives.

We should ask ourselves what we want that role to be. How crucial do we want the SPID to be to our city? You can see from satellite maps that we've already answered that question. Businesses have been drawn to the frontage roads in response to the increasing number of trips that incorporate the SPID. The only way to get anywhere here is to drive and the only way to drive anywhere is on the SPID.

What does that mean for Corpus citizens? It means that our local neighborhood roads get less attention as the constant construction and deconstruction on 358 continues. It means our grocery stores will get bigger and farther away. It means you are increasingly less likely to work anywhere near where you live.

The SPID, though, isn't an isolated event. It's symptomatic of a larger culture of convenience and immediacy, a culture reactive to marketing, a culture without identity, ignorant of its future.