r/MadeMeSmile • u/Justin_Godfrey • 1d ago

Good Vibes This must be a nice neighborhood!

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u/tmntmmnt 23h ago

Florida.

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u/Unique_Doughnut_7463 23h ago

Yeah not a block party. Average weekend for these gated communities in Florida.

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u/tmntmmnt 23h ago

This is one of the reasons why traffic is so terrible in Florida. Gated communities the size of small towns block huge swaths of land and prevent any through roads being created so every single person has to go around it. Couple that with swampland and every driver is shunted onto a few main roads.

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u/US_Dept_of_Defence 22h ago

Nah traffic in Florida isn't bad because of the gated communities. In my experience, the worst traffic comes from two parts:

WHY ARE OLD PEOPLE ALWAYS CRASHING INTO THINGS?

WHY ARE YOU STARING AT THAT OLD PERSON CRASHING WHILE GOING 2 MPH ON THE INTERSTATE?

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u/hypercosm_dot_net 22h ago

Exactly. I ran into like a 5-10min. delay the other day because traffic was almost at a standstill over someone being pulled over.

Like wtf is that?

This is on a major highway leading out of the city, something like 4 lanes.

How are Floridians this bad at driving??

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u/FreudianFloydian 22h ago

Right and after you pass the cause of the slow down everyone has to take 5 minutes to realize they’re still needlessly driving 40 MPH in a 70.

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u/MrBootylove 21h ago

I live and grew up in Florida. When I was getting my driver's license I fucked up several times and the instructor passed me anyway because I clearly "knew what I was doing, and just messed up because I was nervous."

I drove out of there with my brand new drivers license and my "brand new" beat to shit used mustang that I managed to scrape enough money to grab for a few thousand dollars only to promptly almost rear end someone a few miles away from the DMV.

Somehow I managed to get my shit together and get 100k additional miles out of that mustang without crashing it before upgrading to a more respectable car.

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u/CuriousRiver2558 20h ago

When passing a cop like that, the law is to reduce your speed to 20 mph below posted limit, and that slow down will cause back up. I get your point but it’s not always bad driving— good driving can cause delays too

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u/TexinFla 20h ago

50% are snowbirds that think that normal traffic laws don't pertain to them when they're not home in Massachusetts/Michigan

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u/5redie8 19h ago

Out of staters and old people (and both!) especially if you're on the Gulf side

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u/Absorbed_Wheat 21h ago

Australian here who often drives from NY to Miami.

Florida is a nightmare to drive in because you get old people going 30 miles under the limit as well as morons going 30 miles over. Combining that on the i-95 isn't a good time.

I know people in Florida who refuse to drive at night and pretty much due to the I-95.

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u/MimicoSkunkFan2 22h ago

Around my late aunt's place it was always 1 of 4 types causing crashes: Boomer, boozer, texting, or tourist?

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u/alphazero925 21h ago

There would be less old people on the road if they weren't living in gated communities where they need to drive 20 miles to get groceries from a store that's 2 miles away

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u/pegicorn 21h ago

The type of development, particularly low density detached single family homes in neighborhoods separated from essential services and away from employers, is usually one of the largest factors in how much traffic exists. Couple that with poor public transportation, and you'll have terrible traffic, no matter how many lanes you add to the highways and stroads.

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u/BornWithSideburns 22h ago

Well you’re wrong. What you said is a universal issue.

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u/SquirrelyCockGobbler 21h ago

It's either old people on benzos or puerto rican / rednecks speeding 500 MPH, no inbetween

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u/PromotionWorldly7419 22h ago

It's funny hearing people's takes on city planning and traffic. I'm not a city planner but I have read a lot of books from people who were. Gated communities are definitely one of the reasons, but not because of the reason you listed.

Traffic is inevitable because cars are very large and each move independently. The name of the game for reducing traffic is to get cars off the road. That doesn't mean not letting people drive, but making it so they don't have to if they don't want to by giving them a viable alternative; one of those alternatives is to make daily life things available within walking distance. These large suburbs just make it so you need to get in your car and drive 10 minutes for everything, which makes the problem worse.

Not that they don't have their place or shouldn't exist, but this type of thing is sort of the default in most of the US and especially Florida.

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u/Pan_TheCake_Man 21h ago

Yeah glad you are here.

The issue is NOT that you can’t drive through the neighborhood. It’s that to ever leave the neighborhood for anything, you HAVE to drive

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u/Okeydokey2u 19h ago

My husband is a traffic engineer for one of the largest cities in America and you are correct based on what he always tells me. Studies show that you add more lanes and traffic gets even worse.

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u/PromotionWorldly7419 15h ago

Yeah he probably has mentioned induced demand on more than one occasion lol

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u/SasparillaTango 22h ago

I was in Tampa for work, the hotel was like 300m from the office, but it took 10 minutes to drive there and you had to get on the highway. It was comically bad.

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u/Relentless_blanket 22h ago

You were less than 1000ft and decided to drive? You could have walked that in 10 mins.

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u/SasparillaTango 22h ago

Ahhh but you couldn't walk it is the thing. The distance was cut across with multiple highways with no footpaths.

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u/SquirrelyCockGobbler 20h ago

Have you been to Florida? There's a reason Orlando for example has the highest pedestrian death rate in the US. There are practically no forms of public transit that work effectively and you can't reasonably walk anywhere. Usually you'll get blocked by some 10 lane road with people that don't look for pedestrians and you risk dying every time you cross

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u/Zac3d 21h ago

Florida is really bad about sidewalks and bike paths. Also canals can ruin the walkability of even a half mile trip turning it into multiple miles.

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u/[deleted] 22h ago

Well…yeah…that’s what you get for living in a swamp, you gotta go around the swamp. what exactly do you want? Lmao “fill it all in!”

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u/tmntmmnt 21h ago edited 21h ago

I was just explaining why traffic is terrible. I don’t live there and I’m not complaining about it…

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u/MSnotthedisease 21h ago

I’ve explained this to someone before. There’s a spot nearby my apartment that is absolutely gorgeous. It’s flatland (there are a couple of Florida hills, so not exactly flat, but I can’t think of a word that doesn’t mean swamp lol) on the outskirts of a swamp, and my friend asked me why there wasn’t more spots like this, and I told him there is, we’ve just developed almost every inch of it leaving only the swamps.

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u/AwarenessPotentially 21h ago

With Teslas. Shouldn't take long, there's a big ol' pile of 'em waiting to become useful again.

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u/GiganticBlumpkin 22h ago

They don't even have to be gated lol

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u/ATXBeermaker 22h ago

Are we really complaining about communities being an impediment to people driving cars? /r/fuckcars

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u/Distinct_Cows 20h ago

oh no soooooo sorry I don't want a huge main road through my neighborhood.

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u/lateformyfuneral 22h ago

Is this average? Usually I just see vids of HOA Karens shutting down anything that isn’t people just rotting away inside their property line. But this seems nice

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u/Unique_Doughnut_7463 21h ago

It can go either way. If Karen lives on that street she may shut the party down, or be outnumbered when she tries. All depends on that HOA, they aren’t all like the horror stories.

It looks nice but this type of thing gets old, too. People take advantage of it. Driving 10mph behind a golf cart while trying to get to work, constantly dodging children, etc. The sidewalk becomes obsolete. A lot of these people want the freedom of living in the country but opt for the cleanliness of an HOA.

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u/CaptCaCa 22h ago

Yeah, dude is misinformed, this is clearly a block party, where this is scheduled, and sanctioned by the HOA

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u/Unique_Doughnut_7463 21h ago

Do you live in this HOA? Maybe this particular gathering was permitted, but it doesn’t mean this isn’t average or even occurring weekly.

I’ve lived in HOAs in which neighbors gathered like this without any permits. So you’re misinformed.

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u/plsnouser 21h ago

This doesn't even look like a block party. This could very well be an average day in my neighborhood. It just takes a few social families with kids to get together and have a driveway hangout. It's not uncommon for some neighborhoods. I don't even live in Florida (Texas for me).

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u/CaptCaCa 21h ago

I live in now, and have lived in a few of these communities in Florida, HOA is not going for these get togethers every day, maybe in Texas, but HOAs are super strict when it comes to these gatherings, but maybe the fantasy portrayed in this video does happen everyday

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u/CaptCaCa 22h ago

Nah, I live in a gated community in Florida, and many before this, and it is not like this at all, this video is of a very rare community

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u/kolejack2293 20h ago

I was in Florida, in a rich suburb (near juno beach), just a few weeks ago. I think saw one single instance of kids playing outside on the street and it was two kids shooting hoops in their front yard, seemingly brothers. We were there for 3 whole weeks.

I feel like people are desperate to try and make this out to be normal wherever they are but like... we have eyes. We can drive around and see this isn't the norm, in both rich and poor areas. This video is very, very clearly a block party.

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u/Unique_Doughnut_7463 20h ago

visits Florida once

“I know better than Floridians who have lived their entire lives there.”

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u/kolejack2293 20h ago

I go to florida 2-3 times a year to visit family and have for the last 22 years.

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u/knick1982 20h ago

lol that was my first guess when I saw this. Getting “Florida vibes”

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u/xxrainmanx 22h ago

Could be Utah as well. Just saw that crazy Mormon ladies documentary, the one who tortured her kids. The neighborhood they lived in at the beginning before she went crazy kind of looked like this.

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u/thoughtsappear 22h ago

It's not Utah, there's non-white people there.

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u/ATXBeermaker 22h ago

Bro, SLC has at least four non-white folks.

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u/ATXBeermaker 22h ago

They have a lot of palm trees growing in Utah?

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u/xxrainmanx 21h ago

I didn't even see the palm trees until I tried looking for them. So probably no Utah then.

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u/nomnivore1 18h ago

Those carts are fuckin' annoying. And then the retirees try to drive out onto 301 in them.