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LAKE GENEVA CANNOT TAKE THE HEAT
What is going on over on Wells Street, as the street “T”s into Main Street/Highway 50, is developing into a total mess. Wells Street simply cannot handle any more business at that end of its existence. The impact of the fast-food restaurants has been extreme, with Burger King, KFC, McDonald’s, Joni’s Diner, Culver’s, and the YMCA all clustered close together. Yet, there is no talk of doing anything to the two-lane road that feeds them all.
This is without the impact that Kwik Trip is going to have when it opens just past the Chevrolet Dealership to the south. McDonald’s recently expanded onto more of its property to put in a second ordering and take-out line for cars. Now Culver’s is doing the same thing. Is anybody in the city really paying attention? And this scenario of continuing to load up and stuff more customers into these places is going on along Highway 50, as it climbs its way up and down Catholic Hill toward another miserable nexus of traffic nightmare called the Walgreens intersection, located just to the west of the Highway 12 overpass goes on. Highway 50 is a two-lane road.
Last summer, and the summer before, the traffic many times on weekends had traffic lines extending all the way under the overpass, thereby clogging that huge intersection completely. It’s bad enough to sit at lights, waiting to proceed for many minutes, without having cars sitting out across the middle of both roads. At what point can all this be stopped. The impact of the new Dunkin Donuts has yet to see itself into a summer traffic mess yet. What’s going on with the very likely approval of Culver’s plan is endemic of the problems fast coming at Lake Geneva.
A tourist destination can be too successful to sustain itself. Look at most of the National Parks across the country. Check out Waikiki on Oahu, Hawaii before the virus hit (and may actually save it). The crowds and traffic have been a disaster for these places. The visitors come and go but the residents lose the small-town charm, or the closeness of real nature and, of course, all sense of ambiance. There have been many examples of this happening across the country. great fast food is great but not Culver’s drive-through and parking. The property Culver’s is working with is not as large as it would like but are trying to make the best of it. Currently Culvers gets very busy almost all the time but even more so during lunch and dinner rushes, resulting in very long drive through lines backing out into Wells Street. This also affects the parking, resulting in parked cars being trapped and unable to leave until the drive through line eases up. Locals know this ahead of time and avoid the issue by parking in the adjacent YMCA parking lot, which is not right either. The idea of adding a second drive thru lane was presented at the city council meeting last week and was immediately approved. The configuration will not change, and the line is supposed to ease up congestion on the south side of property while still allowing cars to enter or exit freely. It should also make parking a little easier, although one parking stall will be removed to make all this happen. This is still not an ideal solution and Culvers would like more space to work with, but this is what it has, and the addition should be an improvement over the current situation. None of that speaks to the issue of the building nightmare of Lake Geneva’s growing kind of near suffocating ‘success.’ Tragically, the city leadership does not seem able to see this future unfolding. When the traffic started being too much for Edwards Boulevard when it passed from in front of Walgreens and headed on out to be the bypass around central Lake Geneva the city council, plan commission and public works all agreed on one thing. Change the mostly four-lane road into limited access two-lane. Just brilliant.
