Clearwater-Largo Road at Fort Harrison Avenue
Now that we´ve said something nice about Clearwater, we´d like to know what genius engineered this clusterfuck of transportation planning? Dissatisfied with merely mucking up Clearwater Beach with that impossible traffic circle, planners have turned their sights to destroying the traffic patterns in the rest of Clearwater. While towns to the south have expanded Clearwater-Largo Road/Fort Harrison Avenue into a five-lane highway, local idiots have seen fit to turn the perfectly healthy four-laner that stretched from the Belleair Country Club golf course through the Morton Plant Hospital complex into an anemic three-lane road (one lane each way and a turning lane) with a totally unnecessary bicycle path. Have they forgotten that the Pinellas Trail, which runs parallel to Fort Harrison 50 feet to the north, is begging for bicycle traffic? Have they failed to notice that, at the same time, intensive construction has in effect shut down large sections of Myrtle Avenue, the most viable alternative route? They doubled the traffic on the road by making the nearest alternative difficult to travel while simultaneously halving the potential road space that smarter city planners are increasing directly to the south, thereby increasing the bottleneck.
