Monday at 5:01 p.m., I did what 1.7 million people in South Florida do every weekday: I got in my car downtown and drove to the suburbs.
I used to make the commute years ago. The idea this time was to see how long it would take to get to Southwest 137th Avenue and Eighth Street, where county commissioners last week voted to expand the Urban Development Boundary to make way for a Lowe's store.
No one would join me on my trip, not even my loyal sister: ''That's totally insane.'' She might have been slightly more horrified had I told her I was going to Baghdad.
To the modern phobias, add fear of traffic: that throat-clenching despair that comes over you when you realize it's rush hour and you have to make it across town.
CREEPING
But the human being can adapt to anything, even I-95. By 5:06 I was merging onto 836, my speed steady at 10 miles an hour. By 5:14 I'd made it past the Orange Bowl. Then it was a stultifying ride to the 826, where traffic picked up as I approached the new Sunpass-only extension to Southwest 137th Avenue.
I finally arrived at the site of the proposed Lowe's at 5:52. Almost one hour of my day to behold a wide bleak expanse of charred trees on one side and a wide bleak expanse of strip malls on the other.
Someone who's never been west of I-95 might imagine the UDB as a magic line that separates the concrete world from the Garden of Eden. In reality, the UDB is a haphazard frontier. There is already much development south and west of where the Lowe's would go up.
The store is not just the advance guard of pro-development forces. It's the expression of an economic reality: Lowe's wants to build a home store there because the site is already surrounded by hundreds of homes and their improvement-minded owners.
SUBURBAN McMANSIONS
Drive a few miles west to Southwest 152nd Avenue, take a left, and you'll find yourself in a McMansion canyon. At the corner of 152nd and Southwest 15th sits a typical one for sale: a six-bedroom, three-bath, two story mini-palace whose online listing boasts a heated pool, an elegant winding staircase, stainless steel appliances and, in one of the baths, a sumptuous Roman tub.
The suburban dream has come to this: It's now possible to live like Nero for only $599,999.
And there's the rub. The pleasures of a 3,154-square-foot home are disconnected from its true costs -- not just to the home's owners, who bear the brunt of over-development, but to everyone in the county forced to share the drains on time, schools and the environment.
They seem like good deals, these houses that go for less than $200 a square foot. But they're actually wildly expensive. Unfortunately, instead of discouraging sprawl by taxing its real costs, our leaders encourage it.
REWARDING COMMUTERS
And it's not just the wacky commission. Monday, less than a week after the UDB vote, there were Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and the Diaz-Balarts at a Doral gas station talking up a proposal that would reward people who commute to work by allowing them to write off the cost of filling the tank.
It's almost as insane as spending an hour in traffic to get home. But every day, more and more people are willing to make the sacrifice. And more and more politicians are willing to indulge them.
The vote to expand the UDB was a travesty. But even if reversed, it's probably too late to save the environment. As I drove back east against the great tide, I wondered, is it too late to save us?
