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The one way to get two-ways is with money, time
© St. Petersburg Times, Downtown St. Petersburg, not unlike downtown Tampa, Clearwater and lots of other cities, is crossed by a grid of one-way streets. This is good and bad. It is good for the flow of traffic. It is bad when you are trying to get somewhere in the opposite direction, and you have to turn left or right to go around the block, except, no, wait, that's a one-way street too -- I don't see why that guy behind me is blowing his horn, he could wait five seconds -- so you keep going straight in exactly the wrong direction until you CAN turn, then you double back the way you came, except, how many blocks did we come, no, wait, dang it, you turned too soon and now you have to go around again. This brings us to the subject of Eighth Street and Dr. M.L. King (Ninth) Street, which run north and south, respectively, through downtown St. Petersburg just east of Tropicana Field. The merchants of these streets have persuaded the city to restore them to old-fashioned, two-way status. You may debate the merits of this decision, if you wish. After all (one could argue), nobody forced most of these shopkeeps to move onto a one-way street. Why should the taxpayers now cough up the money for their benefit? However, I will not join you in this line of argument, for a purely selfish reason, namely, the prospect of a more direct route to the Coney Island Sandwich Shop on M.L. King Street, facilitating the ordering of two chili dogs, all the way, and a chocolate shake. But I digress. The point is there was a story in the paper that said that the first part of this project, M.L. King Street, will cost $1.9-million, and will be completed in the year 2003. Two-million dollars, and two whole years! After a quick consultation with friends, we decided to put in a competing bid. With a few buckets of yellow paint, and a ladder for turning the stoplights around, we reckoned to have the job done by Labor Day for considerably less expense. It turns out that my friend Alicia actually drove a paint-stripey-thing one time. The rest of us figured we could stand around in orange vests watching, just like the pros. "In some locations, you CAN do that," George Webb said cheerfully when I called him with our plan. Webb is the city's administrator of public works. "We're doing that, literally. You take some yellow paint, and you move some signal heads around." I asked: Then how come it is going to cost so much, and take so long? He walked me through some of the real costs, which include ripping up the existing merger and realigning the streets north and south of downtown, and making changes to the entrance to Interstate 175 off M.L. King Street just south of Tropicana Field. Many of the light poles will need to be replaced to bear the weight of a full array of new signals. There's removing the old stripes ($12,800), resealing 510,000 square feet of existing pavement ($76,500), and painting about 63,000 square feet worth of new stripes (around $100,000), not to mention all those little directional arrows, which cost $70 a pop. There's a special thermoplastic paint, see. Each new signal head costs $800, and requires $2,500 worth of cable. As for time, even if the city did not have its own budgetary, legal and timetable requirements, it has to satisfy state law with a comprehensive plan amendment and an Interchange Modification Report. The Federal Highway Administration has to approve. The city also has to renegotiate its Dome Traffic Management Plan with the tenant over at the baseball stadium. Somewhere in this timetable there is allowance for the actual jackhammering, paving, painting and installation of poles, cables and signals. I allowed to Webb that all of this sounded like a fair explanation of $2-million and two years. I said goodbye, chagrined, and set out to negotiate the one-way streets for a hot dog. - You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com.
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Times columns today Howard Troxler Jan Glidewell Sara Fritz From the Times Metro desk |
