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Elevated lanes: when and how much

By LETITIA STEIN
Published November 11, 2005

It's a big first step: a portion of the elevated lanes on the Lee Roy Selmon Crosstown Expressway could open in time for the holidays.

Officials with the Tampa-Hillsborough Expressway Authority are hoping to allow eastbound traffic onto the bridge from 78th Street to the Brandon Parkway.

Consider the still-tentative plan a gift to shoppers who are used to getting stuck in traffic around Westfield Brandon. This would help relieve the seasonal jams.

But like the holidays, it wouldn't last long. At most, the elevated lanes would be open for about three months. After that, officials would have to stop traffic to install equipment needed to run the elevated, reversible lanes from Brandon to Tampa.

The elevated lanes are scheduled to open in mid August.

The price tag for the Crosstown's elevated lanes keeps rising.

The latest cost hike is related to the electronic toll collection device, a steel arch that will stand above the three-lane raised expressway. The design is unique because this is the state's first three-lane open toll road.

Initially, expressway officials expected to pay $900,000 for the apparatus, which will collect money from SunPass users.

But because of the rising costs of steel and the electronic equipment, the price tag has gone up to $1.9-million. That includes expenses to construct and install the equipment.

"We're not happy with the costs," interim executive director Ralph Mervine told expressway board members Monday. "Our alternative is not to install it, and not to collect tolls."

Drivers paying tolls fund the expressway authority's work.

This increase amounts to less than 1 percent of the cost of the overall project, originally budgeted for $370-million.

The agency estimated that it could cost as much as $120-million to make repairs associated with last year's collapse of a supporting column, including extensive repairs and legal fees.

The Expressway Authority has taken the project's general engineering consultant, URS, to court over who will pay for the expense.

There's good news for Brandon in the state's plan to spend $3-billion on roads in the coming years.

The largest Tampa Bay project is the completion of Tampa's Crosstown Connector, an elevated highway linking the Port of Tampa, the Crosstown and Interstate 4 around Ybor City.

The state has set aside $129-million to pay for ramps to let traffic from east and south Hillsborough move onto the I-4 connector.

"It would allow them to get alternate travel patterns to downtown, to northbound on I-275," said Don Skelton, the transportation department's regional chief. "It really opens up a lot of movements from south Hillsborough County and the Brandon area."

The timetable for the project, now in the design stage, remains unchanged. Building will begin in 2009-2010 and finish in 2013, but all pieces of the more than $500-million project now can move forward together.

[Last modified November 10, 2005, 09:34:06]