By Matt Wiley
Murmurs of voices and footsteps echo through the cafeteria of Tampa Palms Elementary. However, these aren’t the high-pitched voices and giggles of children during their lunch period at the school. Instead, the cafeteria this day is packed with local residents, eager to find out what the next segment of Bruce B. Downs (BBD) Blvd. widening will mean for traffic around their neighborhood.
On January 12, nearly 90 people came out for a short presentation and to converse with Hillsborough County staff members about the widening of BBD ‘Segment A’ (between Palm Springs Blvd. and Bearss Ave.), which received the “go-ahead” to begin construction on January 20.
The presentation itself came in the form of a short video, which showed viewers an overview of the 3.5-mile, $36-million project (which will widen this entire stretch of New Tampa’s most congested roadway from four and six lanes to an eight-lane divided roadway) and outlined the tentative timeframe for the widening’s completion. The county’s contract with Prince Contracting allows 815 days for construction with a completion date estimated for the spring of 2017.
Hillsborough County community relations coordinator Andrea Roshaven said at the meeting that the county has been using these video presentations at pre-construction meetings for about a year now.
“(The videos) help to not have one person speaking and having to be repetitive with information,” Roshaven said. The short video continued on loop throughout the meeting and currently is available at HillsboroughCounty.org.
Following the video, attendees were able to meet individually with county engineering staffers to ask their additional questions. Three scaled maps of the entire project were available along the walls of the cafeteria to allow space for residents to point out to county staff exactly which parts of the project concerned them most.
Enclave at Tampa Palms resident Debi Hoff pointed out that the current bridge over Cypress Creek (located between Amberly Dr. and the Landmark at Grayson Park apartments in Tampa Palms) has a slight rise to it, making it more difficult for drivers to see traffic on the other side when headed northbound on BBD.
“It’s difficult to see the Amberly Dr. intersection,” Hoff said. “You come over the bridge and there are all of these cars that are stacked up in front of you. The engineer I talked to said that when it’s rebuilt, the bridge will be more flat. Maybe that will help.”
Hoff’s neighbor Leslie Fredotovich also had some concerns about the next segment of BBD construction, which she said drew her to the meeting.
“I’m most concerned with the intersection just before Bearss Ave. (at Cove Bend Dr., near the Cracker Barrel),” Fredotovich said. “Drivers who want to go north on BBD out of the shopping plaza have to cross all of the southbound lanes (without a stoplight).”
Fredotovich said that she’s constantly seeing near-misses and accidents during heavy traffic hours that involve drivers trying to get across the southbound BBD lanes to the median and northbound lanes.
“I just hoped there was something being done to address that situation while they’re doing the other improvements to BBD,” Fredotovich said, adding that she thought a fix to the problem would be to remove the option to cross the median at that location altogether.
Roger Menke, a West Meadows resident, said he came out to the meeting to see how the next segment of widening would affect traffic through Tampa Palms. Menke said that, even though he lives north of Segment A, he uses that stretch of BBD daily to get into Tampa.
“Traffic gets very heavy through here,” Menke said. “It sounds like this will provide some relief.”
For additional information about the next segment of BBD widening, or to watch the short video presentation that was shown at the meeting, please visit HillsboroughCounty.org.
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