Highway designers would fit in nets icely

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© St. Petersburg Times
published May 31, 2002

If ever a situation cried out for the sentence, "Get the net!" this one probably does.

I'm talking about plans to build a $350-million elevated, "reversible lane" bridge that will connect Brandon with the Channelside district in Tampa and will feature nets like those on aircraft carriers to keep people from getting on the wrong way.

It could probably only happen in Florida, where Bob's Barricades are the four-legged, constantly winking state animal, and where mass transportation is always eschewed in favor of, what else, more road construction to create more congestion while on the way to solving a problem that it inevitably makes worse.

In the early 1970s some genius came up with a master plan to make it only semiprobable that you would get killed entering Interstate 275 from Ashley Drive in downtown Tampa.

The problem, if you have had the extreme good sense to never try to do it, is that you are trying to merge with people who have already come past the snarls at Dale Mabry and other intersections and are smelling freedom and, in many cases, just beginning to maneuver for lane changes that will get them through what is popularly known as "Malfunction Junction" alive and onto Interstate 4.

They aren't inclined to let anyone into the flow, and the acceleration lane for merging traffic is woefully short.

Somebody came up with the brilliant idea of installing a bank of progressively flashing lights on the guardrails with an occasional block of green lights progressing through a chain of red ones. The idea was to line your car up with the block of green lights, which were telling you it was okay to go, and letting some computer system designed by the lowest bidder who hoped it would work guide you safely onto the highway.

It was undoubtedly a boon to body shop operators, tow truck drivers and the medical community but was soon scrapped for the simplest of reasons.

It didn't work.

Now we have the idea of a reversible direction elevated bridge that designers already know is so confusing that people will get on it going the wrong direction.

Remember, we are dealing with a driving public still not entirely sure how to handle the roundabout in Clearwater or how to drive from Tampa to Ocala without leaving the left blinker on throughout the journey.

Designers are so sure that people will get on it going the wrong way that they plan on railroad-style crossing arms and warning signs to keep them off and, all else failing (and it will), a "Dragnet" deployed from an overhead sign that will snare errant vehicles.

It's sort of like Rube Goldberg meets Spider-Man.

Oh, yeah, and if you didn't read all the way to the end of the story, the mechanism that makes the net work will have to be replaced after each use at a cost of about $10,000, a cost the Tampa-Hillsborough Expressway Authority plans to pass along to errant drivers in the form of fines.

This in a state that seemingly has no way to determine whether a driver has a license or insurance or isn't working on his 14th DUI conviction in the same vehicle held together with duct tape and sporting three different colors of primer paint.

That promises to create something else we don't need, an extra layer of court bureaucracy in a system already operating at a level of efficiency approaching that of a 4-year-old trying to empty the Gulf of Mexico with a sand bucket.

As a reader in Hudson pointed out recently (and correctly in that instance, I might add), I don't know everything, and those who think they do are very irritating to those who really do, but folks who design things like the proposed elevated bridge frequently seem to be making it up as they go along.

It might be true that the as-yet-unopened Ybor City Trolley connecting Channelside and Ybor was escalating in cost from $23-million to more than $50-million, but I still think that we, at some time, have to start thinking of ways to get from one place to the other without building more highways.

And nets to drop on people dumb enough to use them.

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