They must have been awesome to behold, the grand highways of Tampa Bay.
In 1967, one group of planners said of the newly constructed parts of Interstates 4 and 275 through urban Tampa:
"The broad sweep and intricate pattern of the downtown expressway is a most impressive sight by itself."
Unfortunately it's hard to appreciate the broad sweep and intricate patterns when you're trapped on I-275 today. Is this really what the planners had in mind?
Actually, it wasn't.
Like so many visions of Tampa Bay's Transportation Future, this one ran into unexpected detours. But at least it got built. In the last 40 years, hundreds of miles of new expressways in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties have been drawn up, studied, even partially built — only to be abandoned. For one reason or another, many wonderful-sounding thoroughfares — the Hillsborough Parkway, the West Crosstown Expressway, the St. Petersburg-Clearwater Expressway — never made it off transportation planners' maps.
Whatever the project, planners say, the reasons they flopped generally fall into three categories: community opposition, lack of money (for construction or purchasing property) or the simple recognition that a new highway wasn't worth razing a neighborhood — even if it would have shaved time off everyone's commute.
The Hillsborough Planning Commission has stacks of old transportation studies dating to the highway-happy 1960s. Grand plans and projections lie in unwieldy maps marked with thick lines that circle and dissect cities.
In those alternate realities, people zip down what is today the recreational Pinellas Trail in their cars, not bikes. They take a 10-lane expressway to Brandon instead of State Road 60 — or they avoid congestion in Brandon by taking a southern bypass around the community. They drive home to Apollo Beach from MacDill Air Force Base over a causeway across Old Hillsborough Bay.
"In years and decades past, some of those projects probably didn't have good purpose and need," said Bob Clifford, a transportation planner with the Florida Department of Transportation.
Others were good concepts, but traffic calculations didn't fulfill expectations. Or the environmental impact was too great. Or the community fought. "When you start doing the technical work, the concept isn't as good an idea as you thought it to be," Clifford said.
Or, at least, as easy to execute.
In 1971, for instance, transportation planners in Pinellas approved a map with 120 miles of freeways, said Brian Smith, executive director of the Pinellas Metropolitan Planning Organization. Pinellas drivers would have been able to choose from three east-west routes and three that ran north-south, plus spurs and connectors.
"It was never a realistic plan," Smith said. "If you look at some of those expressways, a lot of them go right through subdivisions. … You weren't solving problems, you were creating problems."
Planners started work on the Pinellas Parkway, which originally was planned along Belcher Road. Community opposition kept pushing the road to the east. Planners settled on a route that went up 49th Street across the current Bayside Bridge, along McMullen Booth Road to Tampa Road and west to U.S. 19. A toll road was proposed in a referendum in 1976.
"It was voted down 8 to 1," Smith said. "They didn't want toll roads; they didn't want expressways like that. … The message was, focus on existing corridors like 19."
Likewise, Hillsborough's network of highways doesn't look much like plans from the 1970s, which envisioned a beltway called the Hillsborough Parkway wrapping around the western and northern edges of Tampa. A report in 1984 mapped corridors that ran up N. Dale Mabry from I-275, sliced through Drew Park past the airport and continued north along N. West Shore Boulevard.
Dale Mabry might have been an expressway, without its myriad side streets and curb cuts to slow traffic. And Tampa International Airport might have had a tunnel beneath it.
In the late 1980s, Lutz residents rose up against a so-called "east-west road" that would have connected the northern end of the Veterans to I-275 near New Tampa.
People in Lutz made it clear that they weren't interested in becoming a thoroughfare, said Steve Polzin, a transportation planner at the University of South Florida's Center for Urban Transportation Research and the head of the Lutz Civic Organization.
Community opposition and cost, planners said, stymied the construction of an expressway on Gandy Boulevard from the Gandy Bridge to the southern end of the Selmon Crosstown Expressway. That project is still on the books, but given neighborhood opposition that continues to this day, it may remain as only lines on paper.
There are many others. The West Crosstown Expressway would have been built near Kennedy Boulevard. The North Town Expressway would've sliced by Egypt Lake, Lowry Park and Seminole Heights and needled through east Tampa to I-4 near U.S. 301. And on the Pinellas side of the Gandy Bridge, another Gandy freeway would've provided a westward expressway to the beach.
Instead, people drive on routes very similar to what was proposed 61 years ago. In 1946, the state road department came up with three main limited-access routes through Tampa: a thoroughfare on Central Avenue, another on Columbus Drive and an expressway running from Gandy Boulevard to downtown.
Sound familiar? Those concepts ended up as I-275 and the southern leg of the Selmon Crosstown Expressway.
Thank that report for the fact that commuters must deal with backups along I-275 to get anywhere. It identified downtown Tampa as the No. 1 destination in the region, accounting for 85 percent of trips taken in Hillsborough County. Today, according to the Planning Commission, that number is 2.3 percent. Most Tampa Bay commuters drive through downtown to other employment hubs in Westshore, in corporate parks up and down I-75, in Feather Sound and downtown St. Petersburg.
These commuters, who are delayed in traffic an average of 46 hours annually, pay the price for what turned out to be a bottleneck at downtown Tampa — even if they don't want to go there.
Looking at the highways that could have been, Ed Turanchik, a former Hillsborough county commissioner, said most of them shouldn't have been built anyway.
"The one that I have questions about is probably the Lutz freeway," he said. Fletcher, Fowler and Bearss avenues have become major east-west corridors that "have more immediate impacts on neighborhoods than an expressway would, particularly one that's done well" like the Veterans, he said.
It's tempting for rush-hour drivers to daydream about the possibilities as they inch along at 20 mph. Would those phantom roads have given them an extra hour in the day? Perhaps, but they might have spurred development in otherwise sleepy communities — and new problems.
"They would certainly provide more opportunities for mobility," Clifford said of those projects. "I don't know if, in and of themselves, they would solve congestion."
Given the controversial projects being discussed today — including light rail and a four-county beltway east of I-75 — you've got to wonder: Will any of those ideas go the way of the Hillsborough Parkway?
Steve Myers is a freelance writer in Tampa. He can be reached at myers.news@gmail.com.
This article appears in Oct 10-16, 2007.