Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
The Department of Transportation hopes changes at the intersection of Fletcher and I-275 will alleviate congestion problems.
By BILL COATS
© St. Petersburg Times, published July 14, 2000
UNIVERSITY NORTH -- Bert Delgado tried to explain the afternoon gridlock at Fletcher and Nebraska avenues, and his pointing finger began bouncing from right to left.
"These people can't go through, and these people can't go through and these people can't go through," he said.
Many times, the 34-year-old Delgado can't go through either, even though the intersection is essential to his commute from University North to his job at a Tampa Wal-Mart.
"This is bad at 5 o'clock in the afternoon," Delgado said. "This is bad."
But maybe not for long.
Traffic engineers hope that two hours of tweaking Fletcher's intersection with Interstate 275, planned before dawn Sunday , will thaw the intersection's thickest traffic from congealed to liquid. They hope Fletcher's backups at the interstate will stretch eastward to Nebraska far less often.
"This is not going to be a cure-all," warned Mark Hall, the traffic-operations engineer supervising the change for the Florida Department of Transportation. "It's not going to fix everything. It's going to improve the flow."
The changes involve no construction. Instead, they amount to trade-offs of lane space and green-light time among the competing streams of traffic. At 3 a.m. Sunday, workers will repaint the arrows in two lanes and adjust the programming of all the intersection's traffic signals.
After that, a first will occur. Eastbound and westbound traffic will flow through simultaneously for 35 seconds, a function that will repeat every two minutes. As far back as engineers can remember, the eastbound and westbound drivers have alternately sat still, accommodating each other's left-turning vehicles.
Westbound. The clearest beneficiaries of the changes will be westbound travelers heading straight through the intersection. They swell to nearly 1,500 vehicles an hour at the heaviest times and are the largest group using the intersection.
Their share of the green-light time will more than double. Consultants who studied the proposed changes with a computer model estimated that, primarily because of the westbound improvements, delays would be reduced as much as 80 percent in the morning rush hour and 68 percent in the afternoon rush.
Eastbound. Straight eastbound drivers will lose a tenth of their green-light time during rush hour but will benefit from a lane change. Currently, the inside eastbound lane is shared between drivers moving straight through and those slowing to turn left onto I-275. Next week, vehicles turning left will slide out of the flow into their own turn lane.
Southbound. Westbound drivers turning south will lose their inside turn lane, leaving them with a single turn lane. They also will lose nearly a fifth of their green-light turning time.
However, the engineers hope to make this turn lane more efficient by chopping the green time into two periods in each two-minute cycle of the intersection's signals. The two short sessions will create an extra opportunity for vehicles to bunch up and flow through the turn in a tight pack.
Hall, the engineer, realizes this change will have its skeptics. "If they just give it a little try, they'll see," he said.
Northbound. Eastbound drivers turning north may experience the greatest change. For the first time, they will acquire their own turn lane. But they will have to use it well, because their turn-signal time is being reduced by nearly two-thirds.
They are a small group. They average about 40 vehicles an hour, compared to more than 1,100 traveling westbound.
From I-275. Drivers entering Fletcher from I-275 will experience almost no changes. But in one exception, green-light time will double for those traveling down the southbound exit ramp during the afternoon rush hour.
The changes are being made at one of the busiest intersections north of Tampa, and one that has been overcrowded for years.
"It's always been a problem since I've been here, and I've been here eight years," said Hall.
Fletcher was widened to four lanes about 10 years ago, and the avenue has become busier ever since. In the mid-1990s, congestion prompted the DOT to relocate Fletcher's sidewalks to the outside of the pillars supporting the I-275 overpass, to make room for crews to add a second turn lane for west-to-south vehicles turning left.
But the backups persisted. And soon, both Florida and Nebraska avenues, which feed the intersection, were doubled to four lanes. Now, I-275 itself is being widened above Fletcher to six lanes.
Simply because of distance, the impact has been worse on the Nebraska side than the Florida side. Nebraska is .19-mile from the interstate; Florida is .24-mile.
"You get a very little ripple, and it's back to Nebraska," said Hall. "Florida, it can absorb a couple of ripples."
Ryan Fulmer can see most of the Nebraska problems through the large windows of his office, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, at the southwest corner of Fletcher and Nebraska.
"You've got people cutting through the parking lot all the time," said Fulmer, a 20-year-old intern for Enterprise. "They cut through the Todd Theater lot (across Nebraska). Sometimes you see bike cops sitting over there, and they nail people all the time."
It's a particular headache in Fulmer's job, he said.
"We have to go out and pick up a lot of people, and it's hard to get out."
For the state DOT, which is spending $37-million to widen I-275, the Fletcher changes are notably cheap. The biggest expense was $5,000 for a traffic study. Hall said costs of repainting the lanes and reprogramming the traffic signals will be "minimal."
"To the (Tampa Bay area DOT) district overall, it's small," he said. "To the intersection, it's major."
Bill Coats can be reached at (813) 226-3469 or coats@sptimes.com.