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Neighbors step up bid to slow speeders

Original Carrollwood residents tell of cars in yards and near-death collisions as they make their case for traffic calming.

By AMBER MOBLEY
Published August 28, 2005

CARROLLWOOD - The Original Carrollwood neighborhood is anything but calm.

And residents blame the traffic.

Old, young, resident or not, motorists don't just speed along Orange Grove Drive, Busch Boulevard and other streets in Original Carrollwood.

They float and fly, residents said at the first formal public hearing on the issue in their area Thursday night.

Armed with eyewitness accounts of overturned vehicles and near-death collisions with trees, brick walls, carports and fences, a majority of the nearly 150 residents at the hearing said traffic calming is what they want.

Orange Grove Drive resident Susan Shafii recalled a man who hit a tree head on.

"We had to resuscitate him," she said.

Because of speeders, Craig Kalhoefer won't even let his nearly 10-year-old daughter walk down the street. Stop signs, he said, "might as well not be there ... nothing makes my blood boil more."

Mike Carellis opted to start sleeping in the back room of his house after a car drove through his front yard late one night.

"I didn't want to end up with someone's hood ornament in my face," he said.

Although traffic calming - physical obstacles used to control traffic - ranges from narrowed intersections to speed humps, many Original Carrollwood residents said they preferred the larger flat-topped "speed tables" and circular intersections. Angelo Rao, traffic calming engineer for Hillsborough County, will consider all recommendations as he crafts a traffic calming plan for that area.

Lake Carroll Way, Orange Grove Drive and Fletcher Avenue were some streets that neighbors said deserved the most attention. Still, others were concerned that traffic calming on those streets may turn calmer streets - such as Valencia, Paldao and Lipsey roads - into speedways.

And that's not fair, said real estate consultant and Original Carrollwood resident James Moore.

Rao assured the group that any official recommendations for calming traffic in Original Carrollwood would take the entire area into account.

"We are looking at the entire neighborhood, not just a few streets," Rao said.

As of now, Original Carrollwood's boundaries are Fletcher Avenue to the north, Busch Boulevard to the south, Dale Mabry Highway to the west and Lake Carroll to the east, Rao said.

"This is a neighborhood project," Rao said.

And a Lowe's home improvement store proposed for Stall Road and Orange Grove Drive has county officials taking a collective look at traffic calming projects in Original Carrollwood and Carrollwood Village, which has two active traffic-calming initiatives going on.

One Carrollwood Village area is nearly finished with planning and petitioning property owners. The other had its first public hearing Monday.

The Original Carrollwood Homeowners Association first contacted the county about traffic problems in 1998, two years after the Carrollwood Village Homeowners Association did the same, said Cheryl Stacks, manager of traffic calming programs for the county's Public Works Department.

At that time, road-by-road calming was available but the county didn't have a program to address traffic calming for entire neighborhoods.

Since neighborhood traffic calming became available in June 2003, more homeowners associations are asking if they qualify for county assistance through the program.

The circular intersections that were a popular option at Thursday's meeting range in cost from $15,000 to $50,000 for the smaller traffic circles and $100,000 to $250,000 for the larger roundabouts. Both types can slow traffic to 14 to 18 miles per hour.

Although the county will pay for all traffic calming methods suggested by engineers, the costs of additional landscaping would fall on the neighborhood's residents, according to Stacks.

The next Original Carrollwood area traffic calming meeting could be in the next four weeks, Rao said.

The entire planning and petitioning process generally takes about nine months. Original Carrollwood's next step is to get a traffic calming plan together and get 75 percent of property owners in that area to affirm the traffic calming measures.

[Last modified August 27, 2005, 11:05:06]