Cold, Hard GPS Reality Hits Cape Cod

Cape Cod in general and Bourne in particular are somewhat used to Los Angeles-style traffic plodding through a 2500 person village on a 55 degree rainy/raw day. Memorial Day Weekend 2017 did not disappoint.

If you go back an article or two and dig up our "much like how an Eskimo has 200 words for snow, Bourne residents recognize 200 forms of traffic"tangent, you'd want to score tonight's entertainment at the rotaries as "people coming down to ready their rental properties for the 11 AM arrival of the first Summer People of 2017."

Facebook began to fill up with horror stories by 1 PM, and they were getting very ugly by 3 PM. "I can't get out of my driveway on Cypress Street" was one that got my notice. "45 minutes to clear Main Street" also was worrisome. Pictures from Duxbury, Wareham, Marion and Plymouth showed that it was jamming up everywhere.

"So it begins," as they say during the first Cape Cod traffic jam of every year. It's the high cost of doing business. The business benefits all, but the brunt of the burden is borne by Bourne. Bourne is the home of the two Canal bridges, also known as "the only ways to drive off of the Cape."

But the highways were not the only jammed roads. Normally safe side roads like Bournedale and Puritan began to fill up. Soon enough, bumper-to-bumper traffic was dominating side streets that normally get village traffic.

How did it come to this?

For much of the post-bridges history in Bourne, the only way to Cape Cod from due west was to crawl through Wareham and Buzzards Bay to the bridges. The locals knew this, and lined the roads with clam shacks, mini-golf and antique stores designed to feed off the tourists. It's why Wareham, which in Plymouth County and exists miles from the Canal, is known as the Gateway to Cape Cod.

This changed in 1987, when Route 25 picked up an extra 7 miles east of Wareham. You could take the highway right to the bridge, and the banshee screamed for the Buzzards Bay tourist industry.

Wareham got a reprieve when Wal-Mart dropped a store there (which has since moved west),and survives now via fast food and a very tenuous Stop & Shop anchor.

"Well," they said back in 1988, "business will suffer, and we will have to transform ourselves into a bedroom suburb. At least the traffic in town will ease up."

Nope.

In 1960, the US Navy put up a global positioning satellite to track their warships. It was improved upon and eventually made available for civilian use by Ronald Reagan. Navigation devices became available for phones.

Route 25 didn't make the Cape traffic go away, it just made it go away from Buzzards Bay. People were getting into gridlock on an empty highway with no Bourne businesses to feed off them. Wareham and Buzzards Bay then became the shortcut of choice for people used to the old route.

Things start getting odd when the GPS came about. It put local side streets into the game plans of people who aren't locals. That's another bad omen to see popping up on Facebook, the "tourists jamming roads they shouldn't know" event.

"Bournedale Road" isn't a townie secret anymore. People of the Griswold archetype from somewhere like Utah might be aware of it.

It wasn't like that in 1968, but they didn't have GPS technology on the streets then, either.

Not everything was negative yesterday. I did see a new business model emerging, the prey-on-passing-traffic gig revisited.

Granted, one must adjust to the new realities, and put their businesses where the people are. That's how they did it in 1987, and it's how they're doing it 30 years later.

It's the same basic business strategy as old Bourne, and not far at all (just 75 years or so) from a kid opening a lemonade stand. I shouldn't have been shocked, as it made perfect sense.

As I rode down Head Of The Bay Road in Bourne yesterday, I saw an odd sign...

I should add that it took about 45 minutes to go from Hideaway Village to the Belmont Circle rotary. Most of that was spent in bumper-to-bumper traffic, crawling 10 yards a minute.

I still took awful pictures... lol.

I expected to see kids at the bottom of this signage, which ran three signs or so as we inched down Head Of The Bay Road.

I didn't see kids, and instead saw someone who might have grandkids.

Some old guy (with a circular driveway, nonetheless) set up a table and umbrerlla, got out a hot dog steamer and a cooler, and went into the hot dog stand business.

Sorry for the rotten shot, but "Look... dude has a hot dog stand!" isn't a good enough rubbernecking excuse to avoid an asskicking by whoever was behind me.

It's not like you can call the cops on the guy for running a shadowy roadside stand business in a non-zoned area, because by the time that the cops get through the traffic, this guy may have gone to his Reward and the business will be in the hands of his grandkids. The kids can just flee into the forest, as kids do.

Opening a beer stand on Head Of The Bay Road may have been prescient. "BONG HITS... $5" might have turned a profit as well.

In 1977, they set up on Main Street to get at the road-trippers. In the GPS era, that shifted the onus onto the side streets.

I made it to the rotary eventually.

The Cape Cod Times recently ran an article that gave away the shortcuts locals use in several Cape Cod towns.

Dude must have been a washashore, because I can tell you from experience that locals frown on that. Skipping Route 28 by using County Road is something that a Cape Codder earns, and it makes them angry to see someone from Ohio with the same shortcut in mind.

You don't want to be doing 45 minutes in the traffic on Head Of The Bay Road before you get to the 30 minute rotary-negotiating nightmare in Belmont Circle. Someone will get killed, eventually.

I spent some time at the Trowbridge Tavern after the grueling commute, and I can tell you that the bridge (and the roads leading up to it) still had bumper-to-bumper traffic at 10 PM. You were still doing bumper to bumper briefly at 1 AM just off the Sagamore Bridge.

And so it begins...