TAMPA, Fla. — Your Interstate 275 commute through the Tampa Bay area will likely undergo major changes in the next few years to accommodate the population boom and traffic that comes with it.
Tuesday and Thursday nights, the Florida Department of Transportation will hold public hearings on its Tampa Bay Next project that seeks to makeover parts of I-275 from the Howard Frankland Bridge to just north of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
The project will also redo parts of I-4 to just east of 50th Street.
“Congestion is something that if we don't do anything, it will only get worse,” said Kirk Bogen, FDOT District 7 environmental management engineer. "We have weaving problems in the downtown interchange. We had over a thousand crashes in that interchange area."
Right now, the downtown interchange has the capacity for 200,000 vehicles. In 2015, there were 8,000 cars in that area over that limit, and 90,000 more cars are expected on that interchange in 2040, according to FDOT.
"There's a lot of people that are moving to the Bay area every day, and so we have to keep up,” Bogen said.
FDOT plans for this area over the years have called for everything from toll lanes to acquiring land in urban neighborhoods to make room for a wider interstate. However, FDOT said a newer plan called the “locally preferred option,” would require less than ten parcels of land and be less invasive to the community.
“It includes the reconstruction of SR-60/I-275 interchange with [two] express lanes in each direction and transit envelope in the middle. That would be all the way to downtown area with direct connect ramps into downtown through the Tampa/Ashley Street exit. It would also include operational improvements in the downtown interchange,” Bogen said.,
Some of those operational improvements are not seen as such in nearby neighborhoods. Chris Vela, president of transit group Sunshine Citizens, said adding an exit to 15th and 16th streets could add congestion to local roads and have other negative impacts.
"I'm for minor, minor tweaks to improve the safety of large roadways. But for me, just to take that roadway and to dump more cars into areas that have been blighted by the interstate and have been disrupted and carved up by the interstate, it is simply like the wrong answer to go,” Vela said. "We know that every time FDOT touches that interstate, people's property values go down. People's livelihoods go down.
"We see more crashes on the interstate. We see more crashes on the roads serving the interstate, and everyone's still stuck in traffic jams"
Public hearings on the I-275/I-4 changes will be held Tuesday at Hillsborough Community College/Dale Mabry Campus in the Student Services Building. Thursday’s hearing will take place at the Port Tampa Bay Cruise Terminal #6 at 1331 McKay Street in Tampa.
Emerald Morrow is a reporter with 10News WTSP. Like her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter. You can also email her at emorrow@wtsp.com.
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