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Tampa Walks Off With Last Place

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 10, 2007

A new study that ranks the Tampa area dead last among 30 cities as a "walkable urban place" leaves the false impression that life here is conducted at the drive-through window.

The Brookings Institution may be right that other places have more folks hoofing it to work or to a restaurant, but if you like to walk, you don't need to move to Washington or Boston.

Placing last doesn't make Tampa walkers an endangered species.

Once you park at Busch Gardens, you can hike half the day and not see it all. From Tampa's convention center, you can catch a real streetcar to Ybor City and step out to a variety of bars, shops and restaurants. Cross the river and you're soon strolling the long, majestic sidewalk of Bayshore Boulevard.

Small towns like Dunedin and Dade City are great places to walk, as is the Davis Islands shopping district. Downtown St. Petersburg is so walkable that the Rays want to build a new ballpark in the midst of all the street life.

Tampa has long had an outdoor pedestrian mall on Franklin Street. Christmas shoppers here schlep for miles through indoor malls where pedestrians rule.

Few other cities in the world have a long, wide bridge reserved for pedestrians and bicycles, as this area does in the old Gandy Bridge.

And no big airport does a better job than Tampa International handling foot traffic from streetside to airside.

One more thing. You can stroll for hours on Pinellas beaches, in December, barefoot.

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