Going east? Going west? Going north? If driving through Beaumont, Texas, not so fast.
‘Tis the season: To curse loudly, beat your fists on the steering wheel, exercise that middle finger and to generally just exhibit some of your best Christmas road rage. Unless you take plenty of mood-enhancing drugs you might just fall into such behavior if you encounter traffic where I live.
Christmas traffic in Beaumont, Texas, for lack of a better word, sucks. The problem lies with all of the popular shopping places in town being located in one compact area which one must travel to on roads not meant for the 21st century.
Beaumont is a city of about 113,000 and is a central shopping area for an exurban and metropolitan population of somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000. I could be wrong. This is just ballpark figuring using official U.S. Census numbers and my knowledge of the area, which is just as good as anyone else who spent a good portion of his or her life living in that area.
City fathers and mothers as well as developers did what I consider to be a momentous deed for shoppers when they allowed and built Parkdale Mall, which opened sometime around 1974. The mall continues to have a robust shopping scene and the area surrounding it now holds every big box, national food chain and store one might find in any other city in the United States of this size. Actually, it’s kind of disorienting sometimes. Drive south on Interstate 35 from Dallas to San Antonio and you begin to wonder what city you are in because all towns have the same Best Buys, Wal Marts, Applebys, ad nauseum.
Back here in Beaumont, the environs around Parkdale Mall continue to grow including now, of course, business parks and apartment complexes. But while all of this growth has boomed the roadways supporting the shoppiexplosion of northern Jefferson County, Texas, has unfortunately not kept in pace.
The traffic bottleneck caused by the Parkdale Mall “district” is not limited to Black Friday and afterwards. From noon Friday until Sunday evening, and to a lesser extent during our limited “rush hours,” traffic can be snarled from the following:
–Eastbound I-10 sometimes as far out as Walden Road, just entering Beaumont from Houston and beyond.
–Northbound US 69/96/287 toward I-10 occasionally 7-8 miles near the Lamar University/Martin Luther King exit.
–Westbound I-10, at least from the downtown Beaumont exit coming from points east.
Our new city fathers and mothers (our mayor is named Becky Ames) have a grand vision for building downtown Beaumont into scaled down version of Venice, or at the very least, San Antonio, with a big lake or pond or some kind of water hole as a focus. I’m not sure exactly what they plan to do to be honest. The obvious goal is making Beaumont a tourist destination. (Dead air) Okay, I like Beaumont and would invite friends here, but it’s definitely an acquired taste.
No way can I see how city officials and boosters can imagine they will draw admiring crowds of touristas if their first impression of the city is being stuck in traffic upon entering the town.
And these are by no means our only traffic problems. Hey, the hurricanes we went through — complete with little stop signs at every intersection where a traffic light was out and doing a slalom around downed trees and power poles — were an improvement over some of our strut bangers and pot holes. At least fewer people were on the road when half the town was evacuated.
No, I don’t want to steer visitors away from Beaumont but unless something is done to get traffic moving again, I’d avoid driving through the city on Interstate 10 during the Christmas shopping season and on weekend afternoons unless you are armed with an abundance of patience and have plenty of gas. As for the city mothers and fathers, you all really need to do something about the roads.