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The new view on I-275: a vast bay of bumpers
Commuters, companies and emergency workers are learning to live with ever-longer backups between Tampa and St. Petersburg.
By JEAN HELLER
Published February 28, 2005
 [Times photo: Stefanie Boyar]
Traffic backs up in both directions on Interstate 275 in Tampa between downtown and the Howard Frankland Bridge before rush hour Wednesday afternoon. |
HOWARD FRANKLAND BRIDGE - The electronic sign flashes its ominous warning, "Congestion Ahead," and it seems premature.
After all, you've just crossed the Howard Frankland Bridge hump en route from St. Petersburg to Tampa, and you should have miles before you hit really heavy traffic.
You wish.
The painful truth is that from Monday to Friday, any time between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m., you run the risk of hitting bumper-to-bumper backups that extend from the Frankland hump to beyond the Interstate 275 junction with Interstate 4. It's no longer a rush-hour phenomenon.
And coming the other way through Tampa, well, forget about it. From north of Fletcher Avenue to the Frankland, it can be a perpetual, crawling, terminally annoying nightmare.
And, for once, road construction might not be totally to blame.
"We really haven't done anything that would cause that," said John McShaffrey, the Florida Department of Transportation's spokesman for interstate construction. "There are some lane shifts out there, but all lanes are open."
Gerard Hoeppner, marketing director for Busch Gardens, has been making the 50-mile daily round-trip commute from St. Petersburg for six years.
"Going to Tampa I've been stopped on the bridge more in the last two months than ever before, and generally there's no apparent reason for it, like an accident," Hoeppner said. "At best, it has increased my commuting time from 45 or 50 minutes to an hour, and a week ago it took 90 minutes."
On northbound I-275, a new lane configuration at the merger onto I-4 near downtown contributes to the clog, but jams there have been a way of life for years and never backed up traffic all the way to the bridge. McShaffrey said current problems seem to be a confluence of events.
"This is the time of year when we see absolute peaks in traffic out there," he said. "You've got the start of (baseball) spring training, winter visitors flooding in and the state fair, followed by spring break and the strawberry festival. That puts a lot of people on the highway."
It also puts a lot of tempers on edge.
Ronda Brown commuted daily from Dade City in Pasco County on I-275 to her job in the business office of United Cabs in Tampa.
"When I make the drive, it's okay until I get to Fletcher (Avenue), and then it takes another 45 minutes to get to the Howard-Armenia exit," Brown said. "An awful lot of people don't want to let you in when you need to merge. They just ignore your blinker. So I said the heck with it, and now I drive like they do, forcing my way in where I need to go."
Going home at night, Brown would like to get onto northbound I-275 at the I-4 junction, but she uses Floribraska Avenue instead.
"If I tried to use the junction, I'd still be there the next morning," Brown said.
The backups are a hassle, too, for emergency vehicles, which often have to resort to the highway's narrow shoulders. It's worse for commercial vehicles with schedules because they're not permitted to use those shoulders.
FedEx, for example, bases its charges on a guarantee to get packages to their destinations by predetermined times.
"We plan for things like traffic jams in every city where we operate, whether it's Tampa or Paris or New York, whether the event is the Super Bowl or the Olympics or road construction," said Ed Coleman, spokesman for FedEx.
In Tampa, FedEx operates around traffic.
"Our big semis leave Tampa International Airport at 5:30 in the morning and don't return until late at night," Coleman said. "They offload at distribution centers where packages are transferred to smaller trucks that use city streets, not the interstates."
Many companies have detour contingencies that formalize alternate routes for commercial traffic in the event of construction or accident delays, and most cab drivers know city streets.
One local street that's not doing people much good these days is Kennedy Boulevard.
Many of the backups on the trip from St. Petersburg to Tampa start within sight of the Kennedy exit off the Howard Frankland Bridge. So many people are using that as an alternate route to Dale Mabry or downtown Tampa that it is carrying more than capacity traffic.
Manny Pumariega, executive director of the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council, has commuted to the Gateway area of north St. Petersburg from Tampa for 24 years and has seen traffic grow steadily worse.
"Last fall I began to notice going home that traffic was backing up past West Shore, but some days now it's backing up to (the bridge) hump," Pumariega said. "This year is way worse than last year. Last year the peak evening hours were like 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Now it's 3:30 to 7, or later."
Pumariega, who lives in Carrollwood, gets off I-275 at Dale Mabry. He says he "can bank on it being bumper-to-bumper almost daily from the hump to the exit."
If the DOT's McShaffrey is correct, and the current traffic crushes are caused by a lot of simultaneous activities, then the jams should begin to ease late in April, when the spring breakers go back to school, winter visitors go home and the next phase of work at Malfunction Junction is complete.
While it will be another year until the entire project is done and open, a new ramp from westbound I-4 to southbound I-275 is scheduled for completion in April, with several other projects coming to an end in the months that follow. (See accompanying story.)
But some aren't convinced that there are better days ahead.
"I don't buy that it's mostly all those events happening at about the same time, like snowbirds," said Busch Gardens' Hoeppner.
"I see an awful lot of Florida plates sitting around me on the highway. I watch a lot of the traffic, northbound and southbound, and they aren't people on an outing. Almost all the cars have one person in them. They're commuters."
Hoeppner said he thinks most of the traffic is due to regional growth.
"Look at North Tampa, look at central Pasco," he said. "That's where a lot of the traffic is coming from."
But Hoeppner also takes the situation with good humor.
"Look, this is a great area to live, just wonderful, and lots of people want to be here," he said. "The traffic is our entry fee."
[Last modified March 6, 2005, 09:23:09]
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