Deep potholes fall into no man's land
City, county and state transportation officials point fingers at one another at Central and Pasadena avenues, but no one plans to repave.
By JEAN HELLER, ANNE LINDBERG and JON WILSON, Times Staff Writers
© St. Petersburg Times,
published July 8, 2001
SOUTH PASADENA -- It wouldn't take much asphalt to fix the problem.
It probably wouldn't even take a whole lot of time.
A day, maybe. Two at the most.
But it keeps getting passed by, and the condition continues to deteriorate.
No place in south Pinellas County is mentioned as often by Neighborhood Times readers as a driver's worst nightmare than the intersection of Central and Pasadena avenues.
Central has been repaved on both sides of the intersection.
Pasadena has been repaved on both sides of the intersection.
Nobody has touched the intersection.
The result is new potholes inside old potholes, missing asphalt overlay, loose bits of road material that create those heart-sinking thunks against your windshield.
St. Petersburg officials say it isn't their responsibility, and they are correct. Central Avenue there is a county road. Pasadena there is a state road.
"If transportation officials would travel over that intersection as often as we do, their cars would fall apart," said Jayne Weissman, who lives near Treasure Island. "When we have rain, it washes out the potholes. Somebody comes by and drops in a little asphalt, and then it rains again and washes them out again.
"It's a horrendous intersection. Everybody on our side of town has to commute through there, and we hate it. How can they let this stand when it's a gateway to our beaches?"
Good news. Help is on the way. Florida Department of Transportation officials say they are working on a contract to fix that intersection once and for all.
But when it will happen -- nobody knows.
* * *
The need to drive is a sorry fact of life in south Pinellas. Yet for most of us, nearly every driving venture beyond the neighborhood provides at least one good reason to become a hermit.
Each of us has one or two places we must go in our cars that we would give anything to avoid. Congestion. Construction. Intersections and stretches of road that seem to have been designed by blind armadillos.
We feel your pain -- the fact is, we share it every day.
Now, Neighborhood Times has compiled a list of the worst of the worst, the places where the mere anticipation of a driving experience can raise your blood pressure: the most dangerous intersections, the most clogged stretches of road, spots where the road is in such bad shape you can't help but wonder whether it wouldn't be better to drive on bare mud.
Our conclusions are subjective, but well-researched. We surveyed police traffic officers, planners and lots of commuters to come up with our lists.
Truthfully, it is impossible to judge the absolute worst intersection or stretch of road between Roosevelt/East Bay on the north and Mullet Key on the south. But we decided to do it anyway.
Plenty of traffic horrors rise to contender as the worst in south county: the rabbit-warren intersection of Gandy, Roosevelt and Fourth Street N in St. Petersburg, for example, or the ongoing agony of Tyrone Boulevard, 66th Street and 22nd Avenue N.
Nor can anyone ignore the congestion of Gulf Boulevard along the beaches and on the bridges. Or the most-favored place in the county to run red lights, at the intersection of Roosevelt Boulevard and 28th Street N.
Then there is the spaghetti bowl of lanes of Interstate 275 between The Pier and the Tropicana Field exits, where, if you don't know where you are going, only a stroke of luck will put you in the correct lane for Bradenton.
The area around I-275, 54th Avenue S, the Pinellas Bayway and 34th Street S is always good for losing a few tourists and residents who don't frequent the area often enough to remember that negotiating it requires a series of fast decisions. And 38th Avenue N provides a string of thrills for motorists, most of whom are only looking for the easiest way to cross town.
It isn't always congestion, construction and traffic law violations that make driving here a headache. Sometimes it is something as small as a bad redesign of an existing road to handle new development.
Statistics, anecdotal evidence and the gut hunches of police officials and motorists suggest that the most frustrating and threatening of all situations is east-west travel at mid county.
There are three alternatives, none of them good: Roosevelt/East Bay, Ulmerton Road and Park Boulevard.
Roosevelt has been improved, but hair-pulling congestion remains the norm. Ulmerton and Park are hopeless, even in midsummer. And now road construction to benefit even more new commercial enterprises has elevated Park from a headache to a migraine.
The new alternative under construction will cut Bryan Dairy Road through from its current dead end at 66th Street to U.S. 19, and then, using the 118th Avenue corridor, all the way to the new interchange being built at I-275 and Roosevelt.
The new corridor is scheduled for completion in about 18 months, but tangential projects, such as a new U.S. 19 flyover at 118th Avenue, are years down the road.
Here, then, is our take on the rest of the big driving headaches in southern Pinellas County, area by area:
The Beaches
Beach roads are often narrow, leaving few options for motorists in the sphere of a dangerous driver. And some intersections are hard to figure, such as the semicircle formed by Blind Pass Road when it diverges from Gulf Boulevard north of 75th Avenue.
But it is the gateways to the beach -- such as Central and Pasadena, and just about every bridge you can name -- that seem to inspire the most complaints from motorists.
The two-year project to widen the Indian Rocks Bridge from Largo to Indian Rocks Beach drove nearby residents and business people nuts.
Ed Rosicky, an owner of PJ's Oyster Bar in Indian Rocks Beach, was so frustrated by delays in completing the project that he protested to officials and proclaimed his angst to any customer willing to listen. Now that the bridge is finished, Rosicky says things are better, though not perfect.
His principal problem is that customers leaving the restaurant who want to travel east, back across the Intercoastal Waterway, cannot make a left turn. They must go to Gulf Boulevard, turn north or south, and find a place to make a U-turn and come back.
"It's a little awkward, certainly," Rosicky said. "We've had a few people complain. But it hasn't hurt our business. It's fine. It was just painful getting to this point."
Rosicky's experience might serve as a cautionary note for people who live and work near upcoming bridge construction at Tierra Verde/St. Pete Beach and Treasure Island. Treasure Island officials are deciding whether to repair or replace their 64-year-old bridge. Whatever they decide, the work is scheduled for completion in 2005.
And construction of a new 65-foot-high Bayway span that will connect St. Petersburg to St. Pete Beach is scheduled to begin in 2003.
The bottom line is: Getting from here to there and back isn't going to get any easier for a long time.
Seminole
It is, according to Seminole residents who know it well, the intersection from hell.
In December, Skip Bailey's daughter was broadsided there by a car and had to be cut out of her Dodge Neon and flown to the hospital. She had dropped her 2-year-old at the babysitter's only minutes before.
A month later, Bailey's mother was traveling in the opposite direction at the same intersection and was involved in a similar accident. She died.
The intersection in question is 102nd Avenue at Old Ridge Road in Seminole, just west of 113th Street. From 113th, 102nd is two lanes in each direction. At Old Ridge Road, it narrows to one lane each way.
"You get drivers jockeying for position in each direction, to get out in front westbound when the road narrows to one lane, or to get out from behind slower traffic when the road widens eastbound," said Bailey, a luxury boat salesman. "People keep slamming into one another."
Adeline Openlander, Bailey's 75-year-old mother, was westbound at the intersection in January, in the left lane. According to police, a car in the right lane sped past Openlander and tried to cut in front of her, but hit her instead.
"We've asked the city and the county for help," Bailey said. "Maybe they put up a few more signs. It's not enough."
St. Petersburg
There are days, Teresa Stephen says, when she feels like a deer caught in somebody's headlights.
Stephen is trying to do something thousands of St. Petersburg drivers do each day, and something that should be relatively simple. She drives north on 28th Street N to turn right onto Roosevelt Boulevard. But because there are two right-turn lanes at the intersection, Stephen often feels like the center of a bull's-eye.
"The inside right-turn lane takes you way out into the center of this huge intersection with traffic coming at you (on Roosevelt) so fast," Stephen said. "It's crazy."
She would prefer not turning right on red at all, "but then the drivers behind you start honking," she said.
Their impatience is due in part to the fact that traffic backs up so far on 28th Street, particularly in the morning rush, that most cars have to wait at least two cycles of the lights to get through.
"Then there are some, quite a few in fact, that use the shoulder of the road as a third right-turn lane," she said.
A little to the east is the intersection everybody loves to hate, Gandy Boulevard and Fourth Street N. It was the sixth worst in the city for crashes last year with 37. (See chart.) Police say red-light running is at least partly at fault because people misjudge the size of the intersection and how long it takes to get through it.
"The funny thing is, it is exactly like the intersections of U.S. 19 and Ulmerton Road and U.S. 19 and East Bay," said Officer Michael Preshur, a traffic homicide investigator for the St. Petersburg police. "It was designed that way because, originally, it was supposed to have a flyover like the other two intersections. Gandy was supposed to go up and over Fourth and Roosevelt, then dip down and go up and over Ninth Street."
That might still happen, according to the Florida Department of Transportation. A public meeting will be scheduled for this fall to discuss future design improvements to the stretch of Gandy from I-275 to a point east of Fourth Street.
"Everything, including a flyover, will be on the table," said FDOT spokeswoman Marian Pscion.
Among the city's other intersections with high blood-pressure potential is the three-way convergence of Tyrone Boulevard, 66th Street N and 22nd Avenue. It is big, it is busy, and the lights are badly timed, particularly for those southbound on 66th Street who want to find their way eastbound on 22nd Avenue.
"For years, I commuted that route, and I hated it," said Judy Warren of Pinellas Park. "I always look for shortcuts. It's a compulsion. And while you're sitting there at the light for southbound traffic on 66th, you have plenty of time to watch the flow of traffic and ferret out the best ways to get around the long waits."
Warren's solution: Rather than wait two minutes for a green arrow left onto Tyrone and then again for a left arrow onto 22nd, she began driving across Tyrone to the next light, which is another 22nd Avenue intersection.
"I always catch a green left there and then a green again at 22nd and Tyrone, and I'm through," Warren said. "I don't know if it saves a lot of time. But it saves a lot of aggravation."
Pinellas Park
Although not the most dangerous from the standpoint of accident statistics, the intersection along Park that most people mention as their least favorite is at U.S. 19.
Gandy Boulevard traffic entering Park from the bridge over U.S. 19 approaches from the wide-open road at high speed, meeting slower traffic entering from Roosevelt.
Compounding the danger is the exit from the Pinellas ParkSide mall onto Park. It is no problem for traffic turning right. But it can be trouble for traffic turning left onto westbound Park.
The signal stops eastbound traffic, but there is no signal for westbound cars. Instead, westbound traffic is funneled into a merge lane where it must find a way into the high-speed through traffic and quickly, before the merge lane becomes a left-turn-only lane into Home Depot.
"I hate that spot," said Llenray Yarnell, a bookkeeper from St. Petersburg who works in Pinellas Park. "When you get a green light (to come out of the mall onto Park), you expect cross traffic in both directions to stop for you, but it doesn't. I saw one guy try to make the merge, and another car, going pretty fast, just hit him. The driver came out of the mall on green and expected to have the right of way."
Times staff writers Amy Wimmer and Maureen Byrne contributed to this report.
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