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Tollway reduces time, not traffic
By MATTHEW WAITE © St. Petersburg Times, published February 6, 2001 HUDSON -- For all the talk and money that went into the Suncoast Parkway, it only saved eight minutes Monday morning. But then it shaved off 12 more on the way home. On a test run to the airport Monday morning, Times reporter Tamara Lush and I left from State Road 52 and U.S. 19 at 8 a.m. in separate cars. Tamara took the new route, taking 52 to the parkway and south. I went the old way, south on Little Road to SR 54, over to Gunn Highway to pick up the Veterans Expressway at Van Dyke Road. In a less-than-scientific test, we found that the Suncoast Parkway is what it is: a road, prone to the same problems as every other road. The new route, in a perfect world, is substantially faster than the old shortcuts down two-lane roads. On Monday morning, it proved to be almost too fast. I'm sitting at the stop light at Little Road and SR 54, 20 minutes into my hour-long journey when my cell phone rings. It's Tamara, and she's cruising past SR 54 on the parkway going 65 mph toward Tampa. But in tortoise-and-the-hare fashion, Tamara's speed caught up to her. More to the point, she caught up with the morning commuters. After zipping down the parkway onto Veterans Expressway, she found traffic. The first signs of trouble were at the Anderson Road toll plaza. Then she hit the usual bottleneck at the split between SR 60 and Veterans Expressway still jammed with morning commuters at 8:43 a.m. Tamara called to say she was at a standstill. About 10 minutes later, I cruised through the same interchange, no real traffic problems to be found. The morning commuters were gone toward gainful employment. Joanne Hurley, the spokeswoman for the Suncoast Parkway project, said when planners did studies on traffic impacts, they also looked at the Veterans Expressway. They knew the parkway wasn't going to magically remove problems along the Veterans Expressway. "It's not hard to realize those aren't going to go away anytime soon," she said. "We knew at certain times of the day things are more hectic than others. "You still have to plan your route on the Veterans." But, Hurley pointed out, traffic on the parkway moved smoothly all day long. The morning commuters going south saw no problems, she said. In the Times experiment, a trip from the corner of SR 52 and U.S. 19 to the U.S. Airways departures entrance at Tampa International Airport took 52 minutes on the parkway. The two-lane method through Odessa took an hour. The traffic on the parkway back to SR 52 and U.S. 19 from the airport was non-existent. Using that route, the same trip back took 40 minutes flat. Oh, yeah, our editors made us follow the speed limit.
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