2021-03-04

Hello Key Biscayne!

You guys are in trouble this week. There’s no real news and in its place, an opinion piece. Good luck. 🤞

Could you keep your life-threatening situation down? People are trying to sleep.

Leeeeeets gooooo.

If you want news this week you’re gonna have to look in the archive because absolutely nothing happened that hasn’t already been mentioned.

Key rats like to argue about who is really a rat, and traffic. Both conversations are endearing but futile, and so here we are.

This isn’t about the new smart cameras, which we found out were not so smart. Who knows if those are causing a traffic problem. Someone could try turning them off for a day or a week to see if it has any noticeable effect.

No, this is about a phenomenon that happens for about an hour most weekdays around 3pm, where traffic becomes backed up to the tennis center when coming into town. If you get stuck in it you might be looking at your phone between twenty and forty-five minutes, and the cause is schools getting out, with St. Agnes being the catalyst.

The red means bad.

All the schools get out at that time, so it’s a compound situation. Because it happens almost every day, this is something where a real adaptable government could really show its stuff; try different tactics on different days and see what sticks.

Traffic engineering is tough. The most common sense ideas are sometimes counterintuitive. That said, if the problem is happening every day, and only for an hour, why not try new solutions on a daily basis? You could not allow anyone to turn right from Crandon to Harbor during this hour for a day and see what happens. That’s just one idea. The idea is to have the flexibility to try new things, and drop ‘em if it doesn’t work.

At the same time, you won’t find a community or city in the country without traffic problems when schools get out, so maybe just deal with it. It adds to that island charm of being hard to get (to). But hey, it’d be cool if they did stumble on a solution. 🚦

On empanadas and the depth of island life.

I’ll be trying the pita pocket ‘empanada’ soon. Just one missed opportunity – I’m not a fan of everything at Novecento but their chicken empanada is by far their best. It has chicken in a bechamel -like sauce. Only one I order there.

And good job on finding something interesting and light to write about that doesn’t entail politics or teen-hating chats—I think people don’t realize that kids from Kendall to Miami Beach all do dumb things and wealth isn’t the main factor. I do believe in consequences and I don’t have teen boys but the constant “spoiled” narrative is overly simplistic and well wrong. It’s not helpful to generalize and write off an entire segment of our population as the enemy. Parent engagement, enforcement and a skate park might help.

-LA

Empanadas are way too national of a dish for any objectivity. In that sense I loved that Pita Pocket was chosen as best empanada!

Pita Pocket is street food which is what an empanada is, easy, on the go, street food to fill you up on your way to work or a hike in the countryside.

I think your efforts discovered the importance of freshness. For me, freshness means I made this to taste good, not just a token of a recognizable shape and taste. For this reason, most empanadas leave me with a sense of melancholy. For example, I’ll buy a corn empanada, pull it out of the greasy paper bag, take a bite, immediately think about my time in Colombia. In my mind, I can smell the aji and the fresh, greasy fried corn; I look down to the rest of my empanada and throw it in the garbage—because it’s just not that!

-JK

On mistakes that were made:

Village should stop buying parks no one uses. 530 should become a permanent volley ball court…that seems to be working.
(And you got a typo…first sentence: “their eggs”, not “there”.)

-RL

Ed. note: We’ll acknowlegde many errors here but not typos.

To get the federal government to agree to restore (pay for) our beaches we need to make our current closed beach paths open to the public. Get ready for some kind of fight between condo heads and the Village regarding those paths. 🤷‍♀️

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