Getting back to this referendum: There’s some concern that Hillsborough Area Rapid Transit has not announced the specific routes/alignments for the first light-rail lines and does not plan to announce them before the election.
Not all of which are immediately visible. Air quality, for instance. And, of course, a lot of your tax dollars – federal, state and local – go for automobile-related expenses: Building, repairing and maintaining paved streets, roads, highways; putting up signs and signals; cops to patrol for traffic violations; special courts for traffic violations; EMTs and tow trucks to clean up after traffic accidents; examining and licensing every driver; everything government has to do to regulate, or sometimes bail out, the auto industry; and maintenance of the world’s most expensive military establishment, the prime unstated mission of which is to make sure America’s supply of cheap imported petroleum is never interrupted.
And yet so many think of motoring as an instance of the individual’s independence from the state.
To preface it a little, I don’t have an issue with the new shiny sparkly train but with the rest of the plan and partly with the focus on the train.
The first and main issue I have with the proposed plan is that it’s basically entirely focused on getting people to downtown. I realize that the experts and local experts in the various necessary fields have looked at the data and that’s where they think the needs land. I also realize there is a need to move people downtown. But, if you work anywhere except downtown, taking the bus is not an option. Even if you do work downtown and you need to go somewhere after work, the bus is not an option. That needs to change if anyone except those who absolutely need to are going to use the system. So, for me, it breaks down into an issue of ridership and how many people would actually benefit from the money spent.
Very minor, personal, kinda ranty and not related to my support for the plan: The newer Northwest Transfer Center blows donkey cock. There are no seats in the shade. All the seats are either in the hot boxes or out in the open. It’s isolated enough that you can’t wander off somewhere to find relief from the heat. Netp@rk, UATC, Yukon and West Tampa transfer centers aren’t much better. The proposed stations seem to be on the same plan as Yukon and NWTC. I’d never use the system 9 months a year just because of that.
Here’s how I would do it: Elevated light-rail lines running down the medians of the county’s most major highways – Dale Mabry and Hillsborough to start with – not so much as because those highways would take riders to high-value ultimate destinations (though the Hillsborough line would reach the airport, and the Dale Mabry line would reach Macdill AFB and the Raymond James Stadium), as to connect with a much finer, slower network of streetcar lines running along the next-most-important roads, which do touch nearly every important destination.
North-south streetcar lines:
Westhore-Interbay-Bayshore
Howard Avenue
Nebraska Avenue (reaches downtown)
50th-56th Street (reaches Temple Terrace USF area)
East-West streetcar lines:
Fletcher Avenue
Gunn Highway - Busch Boulevard - Bullard Parkway
Waters Avenue
MLK Boulevard (reaches the airport)
Columbus Drive (reaches the airport)
Kennedy Boulevard (reaches downtown and the airport)
And, eventually, a light-rail line along Gandy Boulevard, starting at Bayshore and leading to Pinellas County, using the abandoned span of the Gandy Bridge – the “Friendship Trail Bridge” (now closed even to joggers and fishers) – as a railbed.
If the bridge is currently considered too structurally unsound even for pedestrians, it’d be more trouble than it’s worth to renovate it enough to handle trains. You might as well just tear it down and build a new one.
I guess they voted to demolish because they see the thing only as a jogging trail. But retrofitting would be cheap at the price if it could be used as a railbed, and save it for joggers too. Just an idea.
Well, this is interesting . . . This evening I went to a TBARTA presentation on mass transit in the Tampa Bay Area. And at the end of the presenter’s engaging talk, as an oh-by-the-way, he offered everyone a “No On 4” leaflet, saying that the proposed Amendment 4 “would be a killer for mass transit.” Amendment 4 will be on the state ballot this November; it would require any change to a local comprehensive land-use plan to be approved by the community’s voters. (See this thread. I don’t see the connection . . . except that he had been touting mass transit as a boost to local property development – i.e., developers will locate their projects near a light-rail line or BRT (bus rapid transit) route if they have a choice. Thing is, though, he made it sound like Amendment 4 would mean requiring a public vote on every single building permit, which I’m pretty sure is not the case.
The leaflet says at the bottom: “NAIOP” – the acronym is not explained – “COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATION - TAMPA BAY CHAPTER”; and below that, “Paid political advertisement. Paid for by the Tampa Bay Regional Coalition.” Whatever that is; googling turns up nothing.
Google Sez:
NAIOP
Trade association for developers, owners and investors in industrial, office and related commercial real estate.
Yeah, I tried that too; but the site I found did not explain the acronym. One would expect an “R” in there somewhere, for “Realtors” or “Real Estate.”
For some reason, the Massachusetts chapter uses the full name in their website, “The National Association of Industrial and Office Properties”.
According to this map, from Orlando I would have direct rail HSR connections to 3 cities. Currently if I go to Orlando airport, I can fly non-stop to over 90 cities. Direct flights are over 100. With one change of plane I can get to hundreds of cities on every continent except Antarctica.
The reality is that it costs billions of dollars to connect two cities by HSR, while with air travel you only need an airline that thinks there are a couple of hundred people a day that needs to go to the destination to allocate some equipment and announce a new flight.
The people aren’t going from Tampa and Orlando. Polk County has become a suburb for both. I know people who live in Lakeland and work at Disney in Orange county. I think Disney should have their own bus system like Google. It would take a lot more people off the road than a light rail system.
So? Every country that has HSR also has an air transportation system. Yet the HSR lines still get plenty of riders and nobody seems to regret the investment.
As for the U.S., it’s obvious we need alternatives to air travel, at least along the busiest corridors.
You could write a letter to Disney; but I’m sure they’re making all their plans around the HSR, which is a done deal and will have a special stop at Walt Disney World.
In any case, the HSR line will have a stop in Lakeland, so if you live in Polk County you could use it to commute to Tampa or Orlando.
You might want to study a map once in a while. Only 94,000 people live in Lakeland city, but 580,000 live in Polk county, which is half again larger than Rhode Island. When I talk about the Lakeland Metro area which is Polk County. Very free people would bother driving to the Lakeland city to catch the train. They just go to the closest I-4 exit.
Stops at Disney and Lakeland? Congratulations, they have created a HSR system that is slower than driving.
I’d also like to point out it isn’t a done deal. If Congress doesn’t appropriate money for it next year it can be undone just like that.
If you’ll study the TBARTA Master Plan – go to the second map, “Long-Term Supporting Network” – you’ll find it includes expanded bus service througout Polk County. IOW, you could hop a bus to Lakeland to catch the HSR.
Cite?
You know something we don’t? Is there some move afoot to petition Congress to kill Florida’s HSR? Or are you assuming the midterm elections will return a GOP majority that will kill it? If so, why would a GOP majority kill it? As noted in the OP, I just don’t understand people who oppose HSR or light rail or new urbanism for ideological reasons.
I’m pretty sure the money was already appropriated.
Of course, that leaves the state to raise the other half. But at this point, I’d say it’s a done deal politically in Florida. Disney obviously is panting for the day it gets its own HSR stop, and in this state you don’t diss Disney. And Miami is already building a new central train station next to the airport, in anticipation of HSR (pending which it will be the central station for Amtrak, Tri-Rail, and Metrorail); which is only part of the new Miami Intermodal Center complex (with a huge car-rental facility).
Breaking news: Florida is going for even more federal funding for HSR.