Just how stupid are the transportation planners in the Tampa Bay area? I know, I know, "stupid" and "transportation planner" are redundant.
I'm speaking of a scheme to build a huge 100-mile-long loop from Port Manatee, east into the wilderness, north to Plant City and Zephyrhills, and west through Pasco County to end at Tarpon Springs.
What will be the result? Call it "Atlanta on the Gulf." It will seal the fate of Tampa Bay as a gridlock-crippled, close-to-unlivable sprawl rivaling Georgia's capital.
No one seems to know exactly why this $3.5-billion (a figure that will certainly balloon) atrocity is proposed. It won't get people into Tampa. It will be what wonks call a "developmental highway." The hinterlands will metastasize with clusters of McMansions and strip malls. That low-density sprawl will be home to hundreds of thousands of new residents who will want to drive to downtown Tampa at 9 a.m. each weekday.
But the existing routes, primarily I-4 and the Crosstown, are woefully inadequate — today. In 2015, when the loop is scheduled to open, you simply won't be able to get to the city from the 'burbs — unless you plan to make it a two-day trip.
Oh, did I mention peak oil? Gas is topping $3 a gallon and rising steadily. The best estimates are that we're in a long slide toward exhaustion of oil supplies. Civilization will change, maybe radically. Tampa Bay poobahs haven't a clue of what to do — although many progressive cities around the nation have already embarked on restructuring their priorities for an after-oil America.
One thing is certain. We're going to see much denser urban areas increasingly dependent on efficient mass transit. Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio, one of the few pols around who can be certified as having a brain, knows that and has voiced skepticism at the proposed road.
During the late 1990s, I furiously ranted against a proposed commuter rail project, and I'm proud that I helped derail it. It was a sham concealed in scam. I exposed the fact that the "$350 million train" proposed by former Hillsborough Commissioner Ed Turanchik was really a $2.2-billion project. The power brokers, including the Tampa Tribune (which owned land that would have greatly benefited from the proposed rail), knew the dirty secret of the real cost but intended not to tell the public until it was too late to stop the train.
It wasn't that I (and most who participated at that time in the county-sponsored citizens panel, Committee of 99) opposed transit. We just saw the holes in the proposed scheme. Basically, the "grassroots" group pushing the project turned out to be an Astroturf outfit fronting for landowners and developers who would have made gazillions off of the deal. Even worse, the rail project would have had a negligible impact on reducing traffic.
There's a lesson on the proposed loop road to be learned from Turanchik's choo-choo. Just as the train was designed to enrich insiders and landowners, so too is the road. Announcing a general route will start sending speculators out in droves thicker than love bugs. Then we'll witness (or probably not, since such things are always done out of sight) negotiations on the precise route. Whose land is favored? Who is the real owner behind the corporations and trusts on the title? Which politicians are, in one way or another, parts of the deals?
Much of the attention on the road focuses on the massive FishHawk Ranch. That's odd, because the loop won't help FishHawk residents get to downtown Tampa. Still, it's worth remembering a little history here. The FishHawk development group was headed by Hinks Shimberg, who distinguished himself by serial bellying up to the public trough. He gouged the public for $400,000 for a lousy play he produced at the Performing Arts Center. And he almost succeeded in stiffing taxpayers for a planned convention center hotel in which the public would have shouldered all of the risk and the developers would have pocketed tens of millions of dollars.
That cozy relationship with government was evident at FishHawk. The well-connected developers paid about $4,000 an acre for their land and then sought to have it rezoned. While one group of county officials was obsequiously catering to the rezoning demands, which jacked the per-acre value to $10,000, other officials negotiated to buy a big chunk of the land for environmental reasons. The only fair deal would have been the pre-rezoning price. But, no surprise, the developers received $10,000 an acre for land that likely couldn't have been developed in any event.
Such a deal. And if we don't want a long list of similar deals, the loop road must be aborted.
Tampa needs to invest in transit infrastructure that gets people around the core city centers, especially downtown, the USF area and West Shore. It will be difficult and there will certainly be profiteering by land speculators. But at least when completed, people will be able to ditch their cars.
What's not needed are more superhighways dumping commuters into Tampa.
This article appears in Aug 9-15, 2006.