Crazy Beans Coffee opened its breakfast and lunch cafe April 6 on the ground floor of the Jacksonville Regional Transportation Center in LaVilla nearly two months after closing its doors in Fleming Island.
Representatives from the family-owned chain and Jacksonville Transportation Authority officials attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony inside the JRTC.
“Crazy Beans is not just coffee, it’s a culture,” Crazy Beans co-owners Edgar and Herbert Bartley said in a news release April 6.
JTA CEO Nathaniel Ford said the transportation authority is “proud to support a small, local and minority-owned business” investing in the historic LaVilla neighborhood.
“The Crazy Beans Coffee café further enhances the experience for the thousands of customers who use this terminal each day, and the nearly 800 JTA employees who work out of our campuses,” he said.
COMMENTARY | The Skyway, downtown’s screeching monorail imposter, is Jacksonville’s troubled soul taken physical form, as if some higher power, to teach us a lesson, imbued all this city’s neuroses into a single, tangible, unsolvable thing: The Skyway is too expensive to maintain; it’s too expensive to tear down; it’s too expensive to modernize. The mercurial citizenry hates all the options. The path of least resistance is and has always been to simply look the other way. And this, not by coincidence, is the Jacksonville Way.
We took the money from the feds for the Skyway in the 1980s because we were concerned it would just go to some other city if we didn’t, and so why not us? Why not us is because we did exactly what we did with it, which is build it and then nothing. Nothing for years. Nothing for decades. The “newest” segment opened in 2000. And now it’s nowhere, serving no one, hardly able to give rides away free of charge for, in a word, nothing. Its
Gas tax hike would generate 7,600 jobs, $1.6 billion in economic impact, study shows
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JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The proposed increase in the Jacksonville gas tax would generate an economic impact of $1.6 billion and create more than 7,600 jobs, a recent study by the University of North Florida found.
The study, commissioned by the Jacksonville Transportation Authority, looked at the economic impact of a proposed gas tax increase that would double the current tax from 6 cents to 12 cents per gallon. The increase would generate nearly $1 billion in revenue that would go toward 72 infrastructure projects across the city, including building new highways and streets and getting homes off septic tanks.
Florida’s JTA Retasks Public Buses as Mobile Vaccine Centers
The Jacksonville Transportation Authority has retrofitted two of its 40-foot buses as mobile vaccination centers, traveling to neighborhood churches and community gathering spots to administer the COVID-19 vaccine. The Jacksonville Transportation Authority (JTA) has outfitted two of its buses as mobile vaccination centers. Image Courtesy of the Jacksonville Transportation Authority
The COVID-19 vaccine is coming into Florida neighborhoods; and transit is bringing it. Buses from the Jacksonville Transportation Authority (JTA) are being used as mobile vaccination sites, traveling into communities in a program known as Wellness on Wheels.
The project is a partnership among JTA, the Jacksonville Housing Authority and Agape Family Health, a nonprofit health center.
As Jacksonville eyes doubling its gas tax, residents are still waiting to see construction completed on major road work promised when City Council extended that same gas tax in 2014.
Most of the work on that list has either been done or is under way, but the Jacksonville Transportation Authority expects it will be 2024 before all the construction wraps up by closing out the final project in the northern end of San Pablo Road.
The original scope called for about $100 million of work but those estimates proved to be outdated and the tab has risen to around $167 million, which includes $13 million of JEA utility work added in to the projects.