Perhaps no street project in St. Petersburg has been so troubled as the attempt to lay reclaimed water pipes under 62nd Avenue NE and then up First Street N. The off again, on again work has left drivers frustrated, although no more so than city officials trying to deal with the troubles.
The bulk of the hassle has been along 62nd Avenue NE, where traffic horses, orange cones and torn-up, potholed pavement have made motorists feel as if they were driving a test course.
Things might be under control now, finally.
St. Petersburg's street maven, Mike Connors, told us work should have resumed by now after the contractor was off the job for a month.
The crux of the problem is that the reclaimed water pipe will have to be laid a lot deeper than planned to get it under a gravity line and a storm sewer that were deeper than expected.
To accomplish that, the contractor needed a different kind of pipe, so it had to be ordered, and nothing much could be done until it arrived.
The pipes should be installed on 62nd Avenue by late June or early July, with resurfacing scheduled for August.
The 10-block stretch along First Street N, from 62nd to 72nd avenues, will take two to three additional months.
"Right from the get-go this project has been fraught with problems due to contractor methodology and the utility lines," Connors said. "I hope we've seen the last of the delays."
So do the folks who live up there.
This will go down as the summer of their discontent.
A reader wrote to ask if St. Petersburg officials have considered changing the way we cross busy downtown streets.
Denver has a system called the Barnes Dance, where traffic lights go red in all directions and pedestrians can scramble across streets in the usual way or diagonally.
While we had Mike Connors on the phone, we asked him if the Barnes Dance would be a good thing to try here, since more and more people are moving and visiting downtown.
We got a definite "no."
For one thing, Mike said, there's no need for it here.
"It might be good for a very large city where you've got 200 people waiting at any given intersection to cross, but we're not there yet," he said.
And it occurred to me later that it would totally wreck the timed traffic lights that let us zip along on one-way streets at the speed limit without stopping, not to mention the retraining required of both pedestrians and drivers.
There could be no turns on red at intersections that employ the pedestrian scramble. And we wonder about some of our slower citizens, and whether they'd be able to get all the way across on the diagonal before lights started turning green.
We're glad the reader asked about it, though. It gave us something to think about.
A.W. Crowder of St. Petersburg pointed out that along First avenues N and S, there are wrong-way traffic signals. First Avenue N is one-way westbound, and once you get west of downtown, at 13th Street, many of the intersections that have traffic signals controlling westbound traffic also have a single signal facing east, the wrong way.
It's the same thing on First Avenue S, where traffic is one way eastbound. Yet at almost every controlled intersection west of downtown, there is a single traffic signal that faces west.
We think we finally figured it out. The wrong-way signals exist at controlled intersections where there are no Walk-Don't Walk systems. The wrong-way lights likely are there as an aid to pedestrians who, of course, do not have to adhere to one-way walking.
The wrong-way signals don't exist downtown or at 34th Street. But all those intersections have Walk-Don't Walk warnings.
Interesting, no?
Here is a word that doesn't exist, but it should: accordionated. A person who can drive and refold a road map at the same time would be described as accordionated.
Of course accordionating isn't safe and could result in a ticket for reckless driving. There would be degrees of the offense.
Consulting a AAA TripTik, one of those spiral-bound series of segment maps that guide you from one place to another, might result in a charge of petit accordionation.
Wrestling with one of those massive Rand McNally maps would, of course, be grand accordionation, punishable by a fine and a year's worth of public service undoing the mapmangulation of others.
Just a thought.
Bicyclists and pedestrians who want to have something to say about St. Petersburg's future street and sidewalk designs for these activities, don't forget the city's open house, from 4 to 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Bayfront Center's Sun Pavilion Room, 400 First St. S.
This is your last chance to see the city's plan and comment on it before it goes to the City Council. So stop by.
The state roadies, as promised, have filled in the mammoth pothole in the center of the right northbound through lane of Interstate 275. Huzzah for the roadies.
They still haven't gotten to the mangled mess on the left edge of the center lane on the southbound side, just short of the crest of the overpass at 38th Avenue. That would be a nice one to relegate to the past.
Dr. Delay's Terrible Traffic Tidbit of the Week:
According to the state roadies, approximately 80 percent of all reported motorcycle crashes result in injury or death, compared with 20 percent for automobiles. That there would be some difference is intuitive, but that's way more than we expected.
Terrible.
- Dr. Delay can be reached by e-mail at docdelay@sptimes.com by fax at (727) 893-8675 or by snail mail at 490 First Ave. S, St. Petersburg 33701.
