Repeat chorus: We've all got rush hour blues

By A TIMES EDITORIAL
Published August 23, 2007

The start of the school year this week brings with a renewal of lessons forgotten over summer vacation: There is no rush in rush hour.

Traffic congestion, reduced over the summer months with the departure of thousands of buses, students and parents from the roads each weekday morning, is back in full force. Relief won't be coming any time soon.

Southbound U.S. 41 in central Pasco, for instance, is the subject of daily, miles-long back-ups. Monday morning, less than 10 minutes before the start of the high school classes, vehicles stood in bumper-to-bumper traffic between Gator Lane (Land O' Lakes High School) and Central Boulevard (the Pasco County Jail), a distance of nearly 3 miles. Rock trucks, school buses and Tampa commuters share the two-lane road, which does not expand to a multilaned divided highway until south of the high school. Traffic flow improved by Wednesday. The southbound back-up stretched just 1.9 miles to the main entrance to Connerton.

Blaming rising construction costs, the Florida Department of Transportation already delayed for two years building more lanes on U.S. 41 between Tower Road north to the connection with the planned Ridge Road Extension. At the earliest, the road work will begin sometime after July 1, 2010, and most likely won't start until spring 2011. As noted here previously, that means today's high school freshmen will be graduating about the time the construction actual starts.

The just-released draft map of the county's transportation capital improvement program for the next five years doesn't inspire much hope for alternative routes, either. The county had to revise its road-building schedule because of higher construction costs and now must account for fewer impact fee dollars because of a construction slowdown.

The only new road lanes coming to central Pasco are the planned construction of east west Lake Patience and Bell Lake roads.

Construction dollars to widening Collier Parkway north of Parkway Boulevard, and extending it beyond Hale Road are not included in the five-year work plan. Neither is there money to build Sun Lake Boulevard.

The county has difficult spending decisions ahead as it balances current needs with state-ordered property tax reductions and a possibility of substantial cuts next year if voters approve changes to the homestead exemption.

But, after approving the county budget next month, commissioners should return to transportation concerns and shouldn't shy away from considering new revenue sources. They can look at their own five-year road-building map for evidence. Some of the few sure bets are projects financed with the Penny for Pasco sales tax.

County staffers just asked DOT to consider adding express toll lanes to Interstate 75, likely signaling both outside-the-box thinking and genuine exasperation.

Commissioners should drive south through central Pasco some morning if they want to experience similar exasperation.

[Last modified August 22, 2007, 21:11:51]