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One-Way Streets Blight Our Neighborhoods

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By PATRICIA KEMP

Published: September 28, 2007

The Tribune editorial, 'Dreams of Two-Way Streets Lay Bare Downtown Nightmare,' (Our Opinion, Sept. 15) sheds more light on the attitude of the Tampa Tribune editorial board than on Tampa's traffic woes.
City Council members Mary Mulhern and Linda Saul-Sena acted in the public interest when they asked pointed questions about a Florida Department of Transportation report that considered the possibility of converting Tampa Street and Florida, Howard and Armenia avenues into two-way streets.

As one of the founders of the Seminole Heights Neighborhood Association nearly two decades ago, I was embroiled in a lengthy dispute with the Florida Department of Transportation. The District 7 FDOT director at the time laughed at me when I opposed the massive widening of Hillsborough Avenue through our neighborhood and raised the prospect of paring down the number of lanes, saving historic homes by moving them and building brick walls to protect the neighborhood.
FDOT ultimately made concessions and changed the design. Today, the project is widely praised and the dire predictions of traffic disasters have not materialized. To FDOT's credit, it has become more receptive to community involvement, but in many regards, the agency is still locked into defending the poor planning and designs of the past.

Sometime in the future, all these one-way streets, the legacy of outmoded traffic design, will go the way of the Edsel. I am not concerned with one-way streets downtown; when people actually start to live downtown and they become tired of wasting their time driving in circles, downtown interests will force a change in that traffic grid. But the reconsideration of the two-waying of Florida Avenue and Tampa Street north of Interstate 275 should happen now.

FDOT's traffic counts indicate that approximately 12,000 cars use southbound-only Tampa Street from Martin Luther King Boulevard to I-275 each day. Roughly a sixth of this traffic uses the road during the morning rush hour from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m.

Florida Avenue from I-275 to MLK, the parallel northbound street, handles approximately 24,000 cars each day. Like Tampa Street, about a sixth of the daily traffic uses the road at the rush hour, but the peak hour of traffic is 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. as cars leave downtown. With the exception of their respective rush hours, traffic on both of these roads is relatively sparse.

Every day Florida Avenue accommodates twice as many cars as Tampa Street does, even though both streets are three lanes wide and run parallel to each other. This is because downtown workers use Florida Avenue to go north in the afternoon, but only drivers from nearby neighborhoods use Tampa Street to get downtown in the morning.

It is apparent that Tampa Street is underutilized and its continued use as a one-way street is not an efficient use of taxpayer dollars. I fail to understand why it should not be converted to a two-way street to allow traffic to travel north to Hillsborough Avenue during the afternoon rush hour.

Further, allowing the traffic to move north from Tampa Street to Hillsborough Avenue would relieve congestion at the intersection of Florida and Hillsborough avenues, a failed intersection, and move some of the traffic one block away to Highland Street and Hillsborough Avenue, a relatively unburdened intersection.

When I travel to visit family and friends in Portland, Seattle, Denver, Washington, D.C. and even Chattanooga, I can only wonder why Tampa can't be like these cities. Closer to home, downtown St. Petersburg, Sarasota, Dunedin, Safety Harbor and even our own Davis Islands business district offer models for moving traffic and promoting sound economic development in thriving, inviting neighborhoods.

Tampa needs to balance its need to move traffic against the unintended consequence of blighting our neighborhoods. Seminole Heights already bears a great burden for the city of Tampa's transportation needs. I-275 cuts a swath right through the middle of our neighborhood - no sound walls provided. We also have Hillsborough Avenue cutting through.

The continued one-waying of Florida Avenue and Tampa Street is just another example of poorly designed roads dissecting neighborhoods and consigning these streets to blight. The damage is starkly apparent in traveling from the one-way to the two-way segments. Although special zoning considerations also may be necessary, a return to the original two-way design would begin the process of reclaiming these streets from their current ghost town status.

As the numbers show, even if your only consideration is moving traffic, the current design doesn't make sense. The city of Tampa, Seminole Heights and Tampa Heights deserve better.

Patricia Kemp lives in Seminole Heights.

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