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Curbside traffic still clogs TIA despite changes

The airport offers a cell phone lot and a free hour of parking, but lanes at terminals remain gridlocked.

By JEAN HELLER
Published January 7, 2006

TAMPA - Tampa International Airport invested a lot of time and money to reduce curbside congestion during the holidays, and it all worked.

Sort of.

People took advantage of the new, free cell phone lot, where they could wait until passengers were at the arrivals curbs and ready to go. People took advantage of the free first hour of parking in the short-term and long-term garages to meet and drop off passengers.

But the curbsides still were jammed well beyond capacity.

"I did everything I was supposed to," said Ed Howard of Clearwater, who went to TIA on Christmas Eve day to pick up relatives arriving from New York.

"I sat in the cell phone lot until they got their luggage and called, then I went up to the terminal," he said. "I had to sit in a line for 12 minutes to inch up to where they could see me, and then they had to run across traffic to get to the car because there was no room to pull in. I didn't see any big improvement."

Louis Miller, executive director of the Hillsborough County Aviation Authority, said he was aware of the congestion, "but if we had not had the curbside parking limitation in force, it would have been a lot worse."

Under that limitation, parking enforcement officials won't allow vehicles to stop by the curbs during peak travel times, unless passengers are ready to be picked up.

As with all airports, TIA has peaks and valleys of demand, both hourly and seasonally. Airport officials say that to build to meet the demands of the busiest days of the busiest seasons would be prohibitively expensive.

"Over Christmas, we had 32,500 books a day for 33,000 available airline seats," Miller said. "It doesn't get more congested than that."

Several times, he said, airport officials had to close the recirculation road that allows motorists to circle the terminal building without leaving airport property.

"That just added to the congestion," he said, "and we couldn't permit it to continue. I don't know why those people didn't just go to the cell phone lot, but I think it's a matter of people learning about and getting used to the procedure."

Other motorists reported that drivers waiting to pick up passengers pulled off the airport parkway onto the grass and even parked on the right side of the ramps to the arrivals curbs, further clogging traffic.

"We can't have that," Miller said. "If that was going on, we'll have to stop it."

[Last modified January 7, 2006, 01:12:01]