Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Mark Sharpe is a former Hillsborough County commissioner and executive director of the Tampa Innovation Alliance. A passionate advocate for overhauling transit in the region, Sharpe is chronicling his own attempt to experience life without a car — something thousands of residents contend with every day. —Kate Bradshaw
Tampa is not a transit town.
Don’t believe me?
Try relying on it completely and forgoing your own private auto for one week. I recently joined the hearty band of brothers and sisters who have abandoned the personal auto, relying on the bus, ride-sharing and at times the mercy of a friend to get from point A to point B.
You don’t need to give up your car completely, but I urge you to go as long as possible and see how long it takes before you become an apostle of massive transportation reform. Soon you will be shouting from the rooftops that we need to invest in a modern transportation system.
Alas, it may do little good, for in Tampa, when using transit, no one can hear you scream.
An early morning ride on the HART bus system is like drinking Red Bull chased with a shot of espresso. Your heart races as you run for the bus stop, dodging drivers focused intently on their iPhones. Missing the bus consigns you to waiting at the bus stop for the next ride, which generally means a 30-minute wait (or, in Brandon, an hour). That can be the difference between making it to work on time or losing your job.
Tons of steel hurl past your absurdly flimsy bus stop, often a mere pole planted in a patch of sand and weeds with an accompanying wooden bench your brief (uncovered) respite as you wait for the bus.
Once on the bus, you notice two things.
First, the payment system is circa 1950. How is it I can go to any McDonald’s and use my debit card to pay for coffee but must have exact change to pay for my bus fare? If Starbucks can figure out a way to pay using a smartphone, so can a public transit system. Better yet, we could create a prepay system that eliminates the need to pay when getting on the bus at all. After all, for every second wasted waiting for a person to shove a dollar bill, or drop quarters, into a fare box, time is lost for bus riders and the long line of cars behind the bus all waiting for their Fast and Furious moment to jiu-jitsu around the stopped bus.
Even offering change to riders would make life easier.
On one of my first rides, all I had was a $20 bill, which I was prepared to feed into the hungry fare box until the driver informed me that I would receive no change back, nor be able to use my bus pass after midnight. Rather than waste all that money, I had to walk a mile down the road until I found a gas station where I purchased some bottled water to quench my parched throat and make change for my ride.
Indeed, now that I am using the bus, it generally means walking two to four miles per day on average to make it to my destination. More than once I’ve had old friends or strangers shout from their car with a worried look on their faces, “Mark. Are you OK? Do you need help?”
No, I wave, trying to avoid shouting over the sound of the road and bleating horns from impatient drivers, I’m fine. Unless you think abandoning your car for transit in Tampa is crazy. But how else am I to truly understand how the system can be improved unless I dive into the heart of transit darkness?
The second thing you quickly notice is that almost everyone on the bus works. They are your nurses, home-care professionals, food servers, mechanics and maintenance workers. These are people who more often than not punch a time clock and must be at work ON TIME. But herein lies the problem. Our meager bus system, which is one of the smallest fleets in the top 100 metros, cannot adequately cover our entire county. This means that the person riding the bus to work must usually wait for the bus, catch a connection to other buses, then still walk miles, often in rain, to get to her destination. And the walks to and from bus stops and her place of employment can be hazardous.
A recent study by Smart Growth America ranked the Tampa Bay metro as the 7th most dangerous in the nation, with 821 pedestrians killed over a 10-year span of time through 2014. I’m doing my best to avoid becoming part of the next set of statistics.
This article appears in May 11-18, 2017.
