CORPUS CHRISTI (Kiii News) -
The effort to get traffic moving through the intersection of Everhart and SPID took another turn Monday.
The City Traffic Department met the traffic director for the Texas Department of Transportation, and all seem to now be in agreement that the state will work with the City to properly time the lights so that traffic will flow smoother.
Kiii News Reporter Michael Gibson was at that troubled intersection with more details on the story on Monday, including an interesting experiment he tried.
The intersection has a lot of drivers hot under the collar. Many complain about how long it takes to get through the intersection, and the City has heard plenty of those complaints. The traffic signal lights there are operated by the state, and are not synchronized with the City's lights up and down Everhart. This backs up traffic in all directions, and people say they're spending too much time getting up and down Everhart because of it.
So, we decided to see how long it would take to drive up and down Everhart between Alameda and Saratoga. We got a stop watch and took off at around 2:30 p.m., when traffic wasn't too bad. Heading north the entire trip took around 11 minutes and 20 seconds.
On the return trip, southbound, it took a total of just over 10 minutes. We drove the speed limit, which is 35 miles per hour, and ended up going through the same school zone twice.
The 11 minute trip included a delay as a City Wastewater truck backed out onto Everhart, blocking the street for about 45 seconds. So, the entire trip on average probably takes ten minutes, and Everhart and SPID never seemed to pose a problem.
Of course, that changes once the rush hour takes place early in the morning, and at this time of the day, some people are saying the trip could take them twice as long because of Everhart and SPID.
"We're evaluating the timing and we're making some changes of the timing now, but it's going to be a process because, in some instances, there's more traffic, let's say, on Everhart and Holly going on Holly than Everhart," City Engineer Dan Biles said. "So we just got to kind of watch that to make sure we got the flow going in the right direction, and timing sequence right for all sides as well."
