TIA access a mess, but just wait

By MIKE BRASSFIELD, Times Staff Writer
Published December 18, 2007

TAMPA - For years now, the highways around Tampa International Airport have been a 3-mile-long construction zone, a shifting maze of concrete barriers and orange barrels, a vast wasteland of dump trucks and mountains of dirt.

The bad news: We're only in year three of a massive, five-year renovation of this major Tampa Bay area crossroads. So get used to it.

The good news: We're finally about to see some results. Very soon, when you leave the airport, it'll be easier to get to the highway.

One of the project's centerpieces, a tall new overpass that is visible from the Howard Frankland Bridge, could open as early as Friday, whisking cars from TIA to Interstate 275.

That's just for starters. Other major puzzle pieces will start falling into place throughout 2008, including the removal of two traffic signals and the construction of new bridges to funnel cars into the airport.

"When we get done, it'll be a huge improvement over where it is now," said senior project engineer William R. Adams III.

The tangle of roads south and west of the airport includes Memorial Highway, State Road 60, Courtney Campbell Parkway, Eisenhower Boulevard, Spruce Street and the George Bean Parkway.

At rush hour, it's totally dysfunctional.

One problem is all the merging and lane changing that goes on. Anyone who has ever driven out of the airport and tried to get onto the westbound Courtney Campbell can describe the nightmare of squeezing across three lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic within a half mile.

Highway engineers are reconfiguring the entire network, cutting down on the need for frantic lane changes by funneling competing strands of traffic into separate ramps and frontage roads.

Airport interchanges project

By the Numbers:

145,000 Truckloads of dirt to support embankments (enough to fill the St. Pete Times Forum eight times)

$205M Budgeted cost.

55 1/2 Miles of new lanes being constructed (enough to run from Clearwater to Lakeland)

20 Bridges being built.

7 Bridges being torn down.

6,000 Sheets of paper used for engineering plans.

287 Number of times, so far, TIA's main runway has shut down for tall cranes.

Key dates

August 2005: Start date

Spring 2010: End date

[Last modified December 17, 2007, 23:42:59]