This Friday morning the Tampa Bay Area Regional Transportation Authority, or TBARTA, voted to adopt its Regional Transportation Master Plan for 2050. It came after two board members defended the agency's work against some negative commentary from the public about the plan.
As mandated by state statute, the agency must update its master plan every two years, but this year's plan comes after Governor Rick Scott vetoed the approximately 25 percent remaining of TBARTA's $2 million in funding the state provided in 2008.
The presentation of the updated plan was relatively perfunctory, but it ended somewhat hilariously with chairman Ronnie Duncan talking about options in transportation with the vast variety of toilet seats that are available for purchase at Home Depot, which he said dawned on him after a recent trip to retail giant.
"There are wood toilet seats, there are plastic toilet seats, they're pink, they're blue, they're green, they're white, they're beige, there are some that talk to you, some that sing to you....I thought to myself, one of the basic things in life, you actually have options. And then it dawned on me. Perhaps one of the most basic elements in life - that is, getting around to our jobs and our work and our schools, we have few options in transportation."
