In this city you probably have your special routes to get places, circumventing the really horrible-to-drive-on streets like, say, S Dale Mabry. It's a major truck route, the road is too narrow, there's horrendous traffic and speeding, with cars pulling in and out of strip centers willy-nilly.
At lights with no left-turn signals, you sit watching the crush of cars approaching as you wait for a break, and when it doesn't come, you're forced to turn left on a red light. Woody's, the popular lunch place on S Dale Mabry, used to have directions on its bulletin board on how to get there without using that street.
The alternative route I take, probably six days a week, usually to the Publix on S Dale Mabry, is Church Street, a block west. The stretch from Bay to Bay Boulevard to Neptune has a 25 mph speed limit and not much traffic. It's lined with pleasant houses, one of which has a bicycle in the front yard with seasonal items (red flowers currently) in its basket. Even speeders don't go that fast. So I was really dismayed when I saw a sign last month advertising a public meeting to discuss speed tables there.
Speed tables are those raised platforms that make you feel like you're driving over a cheese grater. The teeth-rattling, migraine-inducing things are a last ditch effort to stop speeding, but one that punishes speeders and nonspeeders alike. It's another example of using infrastructure to control people's bad behavior rather than treating the behavior (i.e., ticketing speeders). It will work; this seven-tenths of mile stretch of one Tampa street will be safer. Cars will go slower, or speed on another Tampa street.
In this case, Church's gain will likely be Lois' or Henderson's loss.
Henderson is already on my to-avoid list; it runs at a diagonal, so at the intersections at least three streets come together. And Lois has some scary old-fashioned speed traps, those huge dips in the street; you don't forget the first time you hit one of them.
I took an unscientific survey on that seven-tenths of a mile of Church, counting the number of cars I passed going in the opposite direction. On a dozen days at different times, the average was 8.5. This Friday at 9:30 a.m., there were eight; Wednesday at 3:30, two. I have never seen a child in the street, on the sidewalk or in a front yard there. Even taking the city's high numbers - 4,000 cars a day driving 14 mph over the speed limit - over mine, this street, comparatively speaking, is still a dream.
So why speed tables?
Because somebody wants them.
The city's new administration is so pro-speed table it is taking money from other projects to build them. I'm not sure why people want them, but I'd guess they're so frustrated with traffic and speeding, they'd want anything. But if you drive at all, you know there are more of us on our streets than ever before, and we need to use our streets, all of them. We live in a city; we need to learn it's not all about us, every man or street for himself.
I missed the meeting (had to work), but William Porth, Tampa's neighborhood traffic coordinator, said about 50 people turned out on a stormy night; about a third live on Church Street and two-thirds drive on it. And, surprise, surprise, the people who live on the street wanted the speed tables and the people who drive on it didn't.
So, majority rules, forget the speed tables, right?
Wrong.
They're a go, six tables for seven-tenths of a mile. Seven additional projects are going on in the city, from 113th Avenue N near University Square Mall to Bay Avenue south of Gandy, so a speed table may be coming to a street near you.
As for the really horrible-to-drive-on streets like S Dale Mabry? Well, those streets have too much traffic and the cars are going too fast for speed tables, or other traffic calming measures, to be effective.
Go figure.
- Sandra Thompson is a writer living in Tampa. She can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com City Life appears on Saturday.
