The census shows commuters exiting into exurbia, shunning mass transit and increasingly driving alone, longer, farther.
By JEAN HELLER and CONSTANCE HUMBURG
Published May 26, 2003
When Staci Wagner's husband, Chris, suggested buying a house in Spring Hill, her first response was, "Are you crazy?"
Staci Wagner works at the Clearwater campus of St. Petersburg College, 45 miles from her Hernando County home and an hour's drive away, even using the new Suncoast Parkway and the Veterans Expressway. But, she says, it has worked out fine.
"My kids' well-being . . . and quality of education were my priorities," Wagner said.
The Wagners aren't alone. New U.S. Census Bureau data on Tampa Bay area commuting confirms what home builders have known for several years: People are exchanging longer trips to work for the quieter neighborhoods, newer school systems and more casual lifestyles of exurbia.
In six counties of the Tampa Bay area, five of the 10 longest average commuting times are found in Pasco or Hernando county communities. The other worst five are in the outer reaches of Hillsborough County. Six of the 10 worst are from communities or neighborhoods so recently developed that there is no comparable census data for them 10 years earlier.
The worst area commute time: just under 39 minutes for commuters in Shady Hills in north central Pasco. By comparison, the census found the state average is 26.2 minutes.
Think that's bad? Drivers who live in Staten Island, N.Y., take an average of 43.9 minutes to get to work.
Overall, despite completion of many road-widening and new highway construction projects during the decade, Tampa Bay area commute times jumped dramatically from 1990 to 2000.
"The areas where you see the biggest changes between 1990 and 2000 are the fringe areas," said Steve Polzin of the Center for Urban Transportation Research at the University of South Florida. "These places, which were sleepy areas, are now attracting folks who commute to the big city. People are choosing in large numbers to live out there."
The census also found that the vast majority of people - about eight in 10 in the Tampa Bay area - drive to work alone. Drivers who commute alone are on the increase, by 12 percent in Pinellas County, by 16 percent in Hillsborough, by 38 percent in Pasco, by 43 percent in Hernando, by 31 percent in Citrus and 30 percent in Manatee.
Carpooling is slightly more popular than it used to be. Between 11 and 14 percent of area drivers share the ride with someone else.
Very few Tampa Bay area commuters use public transportation: less than 2 percent.
But the story of this year's census data is the growth of new communities outside the urban centers of Tampa and St. Petersburg. (To measure the drive times, the St. Petersburg Times examined communities with 1,000 or more commuters who are 16 or older.)
In a category where experts consider a change of two or three minutes significant, the average commute from Elfers, in southern Pasco, jumped from 21 minutes in 1990 to nearly 30 in 2000. The average commute from Ruskin is up from 18 minutes to 27 minutes; for Inverness from 17 to 26 minutes; and for Bloomingdale, in east Hillsborough, from 28 to 32 minutes.
"Part of it involves more people driving from these fringe areas, but part of it is due to congestion," Polzin said. "For each new road we get, congestion grows to counteract it. Look at the congestion on Bruce B. Downs because of the growth of New Tampa. There have been a lot of road improvements in Brandon, but the congestion is horrible."
Although the changes are not as great in the region's major cities as they are in the exurbs, commuting times jumped more than the experts predicted they would.
Drive times for St. Petersburg residents jumped from an average of 19 minutes to 23. They spurted from 21 minutes to 23 for Clearwater residents and from 19 to 23 for Tampa residents.
"It has pretty consistently grown by a minute a decade," Polzin said. "Last decade it grew faster, partly because we've so badly neglected public transportation. But 20-minute commutes are pretty much what we're used to seeing. Some people say you can go back hundreds of years and people commuted 20 minutes to work by horse."
Len Kizner is one of those who helps skew commuting times higher. Kizner, principal of the Bay Vista Fundamental Elementary School in southern St. Petersburg, drives 25 miles in 30 to 35 minutes every day from his home in the Palma Ceia section of South Tampa. He has been making the 50-mile round trip for 31 years.
"I love the anonymity of being in Tampa," Kizner said. "I love my job. I was destined to do this. But I feel there has to be a 50-50 balance between work and home. So I decided not to live where I work. I think that's healthy."
Then there are those who, by necessity or choice, live and work at the same address, commuting only from bedroom to home office.
In Indian Rocks Beach, for example, 11 percent of the residents reported working at home, up from less than 2 percent 10 years earlier. In Palm Harbor, the numbers of people working at home increased by 85 percent, by 307 percent in Port Richey, by 294 percent in the Sugarmill Woods area of Citrus County, by 228 percent in Seminole, and by 129 percent in Temple Terrace.
In Manatee County, where there has been an explosion of new home building near the south end of the Sunshine Skyway route to Pinellas County and Interstate 75 to Hillsborough, commute times have increased, but not exponentially.
The average commute from Ellenton has gone from 19 to 24 minutes and from Bradenton and Palmetto from 19 to 23 minutes.
"It's not the average commute that's key, it's the distribution," said Phil Winters of USF's Center for Urban Transportation Research. "There probably are a lot more Manatee residents commuting north than there were in 1990, but there are a lot more who aren't. So you don't see the average commuting time take the big jump. It's a huge issue for a few and no issue at all for the many."
Winters also cautioned that there is a significant margin for error in the statistics. For example, a driver who is commuting through some road construction might increase his estimate of his commute by 10 or 15 minutes, even though he's not going farther in miles and the increase in time is only temporary.
Although many workers find their commutes a drag, others love their homes and their jobs to the point that they don't really care how many hours a day they have to be on the road. One of them is Bruce Cury, who spends more than an hour each way driving between Carrollwood Village and Bartow.
"I do it because I like my work," Cury said. "My first job was in Bartow, and I came to like the people I worked with. But my family's lived in Tampa since the 1920s, and I enjoy Tampa. And I'm going against traffic. I'm leaving Tampa when everyone else is coming in and coming in when everybody's leaving."
Part of Cury's commute is over the dreaded miles of I-4.
"I do observe with no small sympathy the people going in the other direction," Cury said.
His job?
Cury is general counsel for the Bartow division of the Florida Department of Transportation.
- Times researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report.
