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Pieces already in place to help build a Hillsborough transportation plan

 
Published July 7, 2016

Different people found different things to hate in the failed sales-tax measure known as Go Hillsborough. • Depending on where you live, or your point of view, the transportation initiative put too great an emphasis on roads to serve gas-guzzling cars, provided an unwanted opening for the white elephant of urban light rail, or imposed tax burdens that ran too many years at one point and too few at another. • But as local leaders pick through the rubble of collapsed expectations, trying again to solve what is inarguably the county's most pressing need, they'll find plenty of pieces to build on. Many of them are contained in an 87-page project list that provides a remarkable breakdown of this need.

Creating the list, adding to it and subtracting from it accounted for most of the two-year process of bringing a comprehensive transportation proposal before the Hillsborough County Commission. It started with traffic models and involved dozens of community meetings. In the end, though, the substance of the plan faded in debate this spring over how to pay a price tag in the billions.

County staff members will be going back to the list soon, looking for pieces that need work right away. They'll have millions to spend rather than billions — proceeds from a stopgap funding proposal based on expectation that property values and the revenues they generate will keep rising.

Leafing through the pages of the project list, as county staff will, provides any motorist who has ever cursed while stuck in local traffic with a look at what could be.

For people in southern Hillsborough County, there would be $23.9 million in improvements at the Big Bend Road interchange on Interstate 75 — a twice-a-day headache for commuters that will only get worse with projections that this is where much of the county's growth is headed.

For those in northwest Hillsborough County, Citrus Park Drive is a four-lane road to nowhere that ends in a field and falls tantalizingly short of the links it could provide to a broad network of roads. The list earmarks $51.5 million to finish it.

And all across the county, $13 million in improvements are proposed wherever congestion endangers the safety of thousands of students at the start and finish of each class day.

These undertakings will have to wait. The county's top priority with limited money will likely be urgent maintenance needs identified in these 87 pages, including bridges that require repair before they can even reopen.

Page after page, the list presents challenges that are concrete — easy to see and comprehend. Less clear, because Hills-borough has so little to build on yet, is how transit fits into a solution for the county's transportation needs. But make no mistake, there can be no solution without it.

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We can never draw up enough lists to answer the needs of motorists if we don't move away from today's one-driver, one-car model.

People in Hillsborough should realize that there never will be a goldilocks of a comprehensive transportation plan, just right for everyone, with a community so geographically expansive and ideologically divided.

But pieces of a best-possible plan already are in place. They're worth a closer look.