Chamber planners hope a plan to extend roads that can guide traffic off SR 54 and U.S. 41 will relieve commuting snares.
By JAMES THORNER
Published November 14, 2003
LAND O'LAKES - Every business day in Brandon and New Tampa, commuters gulp their coffee, hop into cars and join the parade of tail lights stretching seemingly forever along State Road 60 and Bruce B. Downs Boulevard.
During rush hour, a drive that takes 20 minutes during normal times can take an hour. The culprit: too many cars pouring onto too few roads.
The Central Pasco Chamber of Commerce has gazed at that gridlock and is plotting a less congested future for Land O'Lakes.
The key is to build a grid of roads, in some cases well before the projected thousands of new homes arrive, to shunt traffic off State Road 54 and U.S. 41.
That's the position of the chamber as reflected by Tim Hayes, an attorney who serves as the chamber's governmental affairs specialist.
The chamber's position isn't popular with everyone. Neighbors are fighting a proposed $5-million upgrade and extension of Lake Patience Road. It would turn the dead-end rural street to a thoroughfare serving thousands of homes in new subdivisions west of U.S. 41.
"Our concern is that if we stick our heads in the sand and ignore it everything will dump on SR 54 and 41; it will be an absolute nightmare trying to get from one part of the county to another," Hayes said last week.
Lake Patience is just part of the grid laid out by a "central Pasco road network study" okayed by county commissioners in 2000. Other critical links include:
- Tower Road. It now peters out in a cattle pasture as it runs southwest from U.S. 41, but Pasco plans to extend it to serve a string of housing developments totaling 17,000 homes between U.S. 41 and the Suncoast Parkway.
- Bell Lake Road extension. The east-west road ends short of Collier Parkway, but a final several hundred feet of asphalt would connect Collier to U.S. 41. The goal is to relieve Collier's increasingly congested SR 54 intersection.
- Sunlake Boulevard. The future four-lane road would cross SR 54 about 2 miles west of U.S. 41. Plans show Sunlake intersecting both Lake Patience and Tower roads.
- Ridge Road extension: The 8.6-mile highway, long delayed by environmental activists, would connect Moon Lake Road, the Suncoast Parkway and U.S. 41.
Wesley Chapel, facing similar suburban growth in the form of monster-sized bedroom communities, is getting a similar road grid.
Plans call for extending and improving Overpass, Chancey and Curley roads, as well as SR 56 and the West Zephyrhills Bypass.
Brandon and New Tampa, for all their virtues, are cited as traffic examples to avoid. It's an assessment even one of Hillsborough's main road planners, Rich Clarendon, won't deny.
With the explosion of New Tampa housing developments such as Tampa Palms - and new ones coming online like Live Oak Preserve - planners realize Bruce B. Downs can't handle the load.
"The intention was to have a fully developed road system come online so that people would not necessarily have to rely on Bruce B. Downs," Clarendon said.
Easier said than done. One road extension - Cross Creek Boulevard - was recently pushed through to Morris Bridge Road.
But residents of many subdivisions, some of them walled, haven't taken kindly to retrofitting their neighborhoods with asphalt, Clarendon said, even if it means smoother traffic.
"It's much easier to lay out roads in advance and have the development pattern evolve so that people are expecting it," Clarendon said.
Land O'Lakes' battle over the Lake Patience Road extension is a case in point.
Although much of the highway's route is rural and relatively undeveloped, its section through the Oakstead development skirts new homes. Owners are angry about the prospect of thousands of cars whooshing by just beyond their privacy walls.
Residents such as Bob Thurston insist builders withheld that information when they bought their homes. The county's goal is to extend and upgrade two lanes of Lake Patience in 2006, with plans to widen the road to four lanes later.
"I will be keeping my eye on it and doing everything to torpedo those plans," Thurston said.
Critics of road expansion complain that building roads in advance encourages development that might otherwise not have come.
"That road is developer driven," Lake Patience neighbor Ed Moore said. "It's not something we need. It's something that developments that aren't here yet need for their approval."
Hayes doesn't deny the link between growth and roads. In fact, Pasco's aim is for developers to pay for individual sections of road to serve their subdivisions, sections later fused into one long thoroughfare.
But for him it's a question of avoiding excruciating commutes and bumper-to-bumper shopping trips, deadening as they are to the Land O'Lakes business community.
"Growth is inevitable whether we like it or not," Hayes said. "So we'd rather see the county ahead of the curve with a transportation system."
