Justin Garcia
At Metro Rapid's MLK and Nebraska stop, where all the seats were formerly ripped out, two have been reinstalled.
The reinstallation of Tampa's Metro Rapid bus seats has been delayed, Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority (HART) says.
After Creative Loafing Tampa Bay published a story about Metro Rapid's missing bus seats on Dec. 1, HART said they would reinstall the seats. The Tampa Police Department had requested their removal in 2020, claiming public seating led to loitering, drug dealing and vandalism.
HART told CL the project would be completed by the end of last week.
But this week, many seats at the stops were still missing. Some stops that were formerly completely gutted had two seats reinstalled, with several of the metal housings for the seats still empty. Most of the stops that did have two seats reinstalled found the seats spaced far apart from each other. Others had small benches with anti-homeless bars in the middle installed instead of the original seating.
Some Metro Rapid stops, like one south of Sligh Avenue on Nebraska Avenue, still had zero seats as of Wednesday.
CL reached out to Nikki Frenney, director of communications and marketing at HART, for an update on how the reinstall was going.
Frenney told CL that Insite—the company that is contracted by HART to reinstall the seats—were not able to handle all of the seat reinstalls last week, as she had formerly told CL would be the case. She said that Insite told her that around 25% of the original bus stop seats have been reinstalled.
"If not by the end of this week, then all of the seats should be reinstalled by the end of the month," Frenney told CL.
In the meantime, some bus riders up and down Nebraska Avenue now have a place to sit, but many are still stuck waiting without seating.
The Metro Rapid route was launched in 2013, with seating for 8-12 people originally included in the construction of the shelters. The route is marketed as a quick and easy way for people to transit between the University Area and Downtown Tampa, with an advertised 15-minute wait on weekdays and 30 minutes on the weekend. But after the seats were removed, those with trouble standing for extended periods of time found themselves in a tough spot.
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