The first thing you notice is not the heat or the palm trees. It is that the person in front of you in the left turn lane left a full car length of space and nobody is honking.
The first time I drove on US-1 through Ponte Vedra on a weekday morning, I thought something was wrong. The traffic was moving. Not crawling, not negotiating, not performing the elaborate dance of merge and counter-merge that characterizes most major metro corridors at rush hour. It was just moving. Nothing was wrong. That is simply how it is here.
I want to be accurate about this. Northeast Florida does have traffic. But if you are coming from the New York metro, the Chicago 290, the 495 around Boston, or the I-71 and I-75 interchange in Cincinnati, Northeast Florida traffic will feel like a mild inconvenience on its worst days and practically empty on its average ones.
The pace difference is not just about traffic, though traffic is the most immediate thing people notice. It shows up in smaller ways that accumulate over time into something that feels, if you let it, like a genuine change in how you move through your days.
