BEAUTY:Tampa’s 3-lane reversible ‘bridge’

His first words to McCue were: “That road of yours is a piece of shit. What are you going to do about it?”

Through downtown Tampa THCEA’s Crosstown Expressway is a standard elevated concrete road, AASHTO-standard, minimal height for clearance, on pairs of circular concrete columns. It was appropriate to the area it traversed when it was built in the late 1970s: the harborside southern edge of the city, an area of largely abandoned warehouses and many lots bulldozed for cheap surface carparking.

A pretty shitty part of town. But things have changed for the better.

Greco was not a typical university kind of 60s lefty though he got a BSc in sociology. He came from a family with a hardware business, and having a goodly mix of idealism and realism, a ton of charm and the gift of the gab, he became the youngest mayor of a major US city in 1963 – at age 29. After ten years he resigned the mayorship to work for over 30 years at the large DeBartolo real estate development company. In 1995 he returned to the mayorship, where he is so popular he runs unopposed. He’s rare in getting the support of both conservatives and lefties.

The old/young mayor is heavily committed to rejuvenation of Tampa’s central business district, and in particular to promoting new attractions along the harbor. This is a nicely variegated waterfront with port channels formed out of rivers and an island (Harbour Island) wedged in at the head of Tampa Bay. A 27-story Marriott hotel, a convention center, an acquarium, an ice-hockey stadium, a number of highrise office buildings, highpriced condos and boutiquey stores have been built. This development has been terrific for the toll road, which provides the most direct access to the downtown, especially on the southern side which is the focus of Dick Greco’s downtown renewal.

Traffic on the Crosstown reached 68k tolls/day and $9m/yr revenue in 1988. A 47% average increase in toll rates then knocked traffic below 60k/tolls/day and boosted revenues to nearly $12m but traffic and revenue remained stalled around those levels through 1994. But as of this year traffic is running around 80k tolls/day and revenues are about $22m, increases in the six years of 33% and 83% (There was another toll increase of about 40% in Oct 99).

The 23km (14mi) toll road provides a fast link between the downtown 15km (9mi) out to the developing eastern suburbs just short of Brandon at I-75, and 8km (5mi) westward to the gentrifying inner southwestern suburbs. The southwestern leg opened in 1976 and was at first an embarrassing flop. Tolls would not service the debt and until the mid-90s Hillsboro co had to pump county gas tax money into the THCEA to allow it to service debt. The eastern leg to I-75 always attracted solid traffic, because the parallel FL-60 arterial is horribly slow with many traffic signals, plus rail lines to the port with trains crossing at grade and liable to block the road for quarter of an hour during the morning rush!

“We’ve been accused of paying the railroad to park their trains over FL-60,” says McCue of the THCEA. No-one is planning to spend money grade-separating FL-60 traffic from the trains. Further north is I-4. Still only 2x2-lanes but the subject of a typical urban DOT upgrade – very slow (8 years), very disruptive (constant reroutings in narrowed lanes), little benefit (an extra lane each way) and very expensive ($800m). Florida is changing. It is presently pro-roads. Guv Jeb Bush reportedly told his sec of transp Tom Barry in one of his early conversations: “I’ve only got one transport policy: Build roads. And build more roads.”

But the design of I-4 in Tampa is the sorry heritage of Florida’s anti-car sec of transport Ben Watts who preached at Floridians that they’d have to leave their cars home and ride the rails. In his term no roads were to be widened beyond 6-lanes regardless of traffic projections. Tampans can dub their I-4 Watts Way!

Cost of the I-4 widening is $70m/mile and $35m per extra lane-mi ($22m/lane-km) added.

So it is left to the toll authority to fill in.

When he arrived at THCEA Pat McCue inherited a plan to do third lanes on his Crosstown Exwy too. It was due to go to LOS-F within ten years and already suffering congestion from the revival of downtown. Most of the third-laning could have been done by filling in the grass median mostly 14m (46') width. But McCue was wary of simply pressing ahead with old plans. He’d received a terrible drubbing in his first year – beaten 7 to zero by Hillsboro county commissioners when he formally presented them with an old plan for a $40m western extension (taking the exwy right to the Gandy Bridge.)

He wasn’t sure third-laning made sense from a traffic standpoint. The traffic split on the congested western leg is 80/20 in rush hours, and rather empty out of the rush. It is essentially a downtown commute road. Given the success of the downtown/harbor area it seems destined to continue to be a commute road plus a vacation/special events road. The arrival or departure of a cruise ship, big conventions, sporting events, traffic to the aquarium and museums all generate similar tidal surges of traffic. Would an extra lane each side help handle those kinds of crowds?

A further consideration was that filling in the grassy median would hardly enhance the beauty of the road. On the western approaches it has a parkway appearance, winding along the mangrove-green edges of a tidal channel, the sides grassed. Paving over the grassy median would definitely detract from that parkway-like character.

During 3rd laning one of the two lanes would often have to be closed, or construction would be constrained to fit around rush-hour traffic. That could cost another $20m, they figured.

McCue and his board of directors all agreed the 3rd laning should be canned. At least they needed to start again and look thoroughly at alternatives. THCEA’s political adviser was Harold Aldrich, a veteran local PR man and public involvement specialist who believes very strongly in involvement and is good at it.

Political minefields

They were looking also at ways to improve the eastern end of the expressway. With heavy development now east beyond I-75 a lot of motorists needing to use the expressway had difficulty getting on it because of the I-75 barrier. But this was a political minefield too. The THCEA had previously been beaten up over an FDOT longrange plan which had the expressway extended over I-75 and through Brandon as an elevated expressway linking directly to FL-60.

Aldridge and McCue’s first move was to get the board’s agreement that the design of any Brandon extension should be driven by what people there wanted, within the limits of what tolls would support. They appointed a local design group and included the two most vocal critics of the previous expressway plans in the team.

It was in that process that they came upon the idea of building a high elegant long-spanning bridge over I-75, a signature ‘Gateway to Brandon’ using bold segmental box girder construction. Since the congestion problem was so tidal it followed that the Brandon bridge (a mile from the end of the present expressway into Brandon) need not be 2x2-lanes but could be 2-lanes reversible.

The Brandon reversible bridge concept then got factored into the alternatives for the whole length of the eastern segment downtown to I-75. It went through two years of public advisory committees, charettes and other public meetings in comparisons with widening into the median. At first the plan was for 2-lanes reversible elevated the whole length of the project –18km (nearly 11mi). But once they’d honed in on concrete segmental box girder the cost of widening from 2-lanes to 3-lanes for the section I-75 to downtown was so small (less than 10% more) they fixed on 3-lanes reversible.

At the hearings several people asked how they’d handle the danger of head-on collisions. What if someone got on the highway going counter to the traffic flow? It has happened. Just this year two women were killed in the Baltimore Harbor tunnel by a wrong-way driver. Also on the pioneer reversible lanes facility, the Shirley Highway (I-395) in northern Virginia. Tampa plans, in addition to gates, to deploy a net system to stop wrong-way vehicles that derives from navy systems that catch pilotless reconnaissance planes for resuse.

Bridge-builder groups that presented initial proposals put forward an elevated roadway scheme that used standard AASHTO prefab bulb-T girders – essentially the design in the downtown area that Mayor Greko characterized so harshly. A conventional elevated wasn’t going to hack it politically. McCue got to telling everyone involved: “We are just not interested in AASHTO designs. Forget it. If you are thinking AASHTO standards, don’t waste your time with us. We need something innovative and beautiful.”

Gene ‘Boxgirder’ Figg, the talented designer of the Sunshine Skyway and other concrete segmental box girder construction is in charge of the design. Before McCue and his staff put the project to the board for approval they had the design and the costs reviewed by an independent panel of engineers. After their strong endorsement the board gave the OK.

The project is divided into (1) a 990m (3250') 2-lane section of 14.6m (48') width deck at the eastern end – the Brandon gateway bridge (2) 8700m (28,550') of 3-lanes with a 18m (59') width deck. In the center section the 3-lanes reversible come down to ground level to provide for a short projected connector to I-4. If the ramps of the connector had to climb over elevated central lanes the grades of the connector would be too steep for trucks. That will be a big truck route to the port. The central reversible has 5 slip-ramps for connections to the regular lanes (3 westbound, 2 eastbound). At the downtown end the reversible roadway swings away from its central median position and goes under the regular lanes and forms an at-grade boulevard-type distributor system. The right of way along Meridian St presently has a little used rail line and sidings on it, but the plan is to remove these and create a new high quality lavishly landscaped dual carriageway.

The elevated sections will be made up of factory cast sections that incorporate both deck and box girder in the one casting. Each section will be about 5m (16’4") long. The box girder will be 2.75m deep (9’1"). Sections will be trucked in to the median and lifted by crane and stiched together with steel cables to form spans of 42m (about 140'). They will rest on a single run of columns 1.8m x1.2m (6' x 4') leaving the median grassed.

The bridging will have a deck area of 153,000 sq m (1.7m sq ft) and will constitute 25 lane-km (15.7 lane-mi) of travel lanes and is estimated to cost about $140m or $5.6m/lane-km ($9m/lane-mi). The generous cross-section has a full 3.6m (11’8) breakdown-shoulder either side so at a pinch the roadway could be restriped for extra travel lanes during construction work on the regular lanes, or for special events. The total project including at-grade work is estimated to cost around $250m. For that Tampa gets about 56 lane-km (35 lane-mi). Since the peak hour flows are tidal daily they effectively get double duty or 112 lane-km (70 lane-mi). Cost is $2.3m/lane-km ($3.6m/lane-mi) added – about one-tenth the cost of the thirdlaning Watts Way job on I-4!

Zero opposition

There seems to be virtually zero opposition to the project. Aldrich says that is a vindication of an open planning process and insistence on quality design. When McCue visited Greco to tell him about the 3-lane reversible ‘bridge’ project, he liked it, but asked: “How much do you want from the city?” McCue told him “Nothing, the motorists will pay for it.” The mayor said he “really liked it a lot” and surely there must be something he could do to help. McCue said he thought fast and blurted out: “You could star in a video on the project.” He does. The mayor who used to hate the expressway is now the main public figure spruiking for its bright new ‘bridge’ project.

And that old AASHTO-standard elevated section through the downtown with the deadzone underneath that the mayor hates? It’s getting steam-cleaned and painted, and landscaping. $2m for the first section. A lady called THCEA and complained about the “waste tearing that perfectly good road down, and rebuilding it.” (Contacts THCEA 904 488 4671, Harold Aldrich 813 985 9663)