Terrible Tampa Traffic

As I wrote in my last blog about Tampa being a tale of two cities, it is the lack of planning and vision that has led to this terrible traffic. We have just built different developments and neighborhoods in and around Tampa and just connected them with surface streets. The problem is every time a new development was made or built within the city limits it was just stuck wherever the developer wanted to stick the development in to make the most amount of money for themselves or whomever they bribed to get the project done. Even today you see it with the new development of the west shore district. They added all those homes south on Gandy on West Shore Blvd, but they didn't bother to widen West Shore Blvd. So now you have a thousand more cars that travel down West Shore Blvd and the same 2 lane road that was there from 1980. Most of our roads in Tampa were built 50 or 60 plus years ago with that traffic in mind and there has been little done to improve or widen the roads since. Let that sink in.... Our roads are no wider than they were 50 or 60 years ago, but the number of people who have cars on the road and now live in Tampa has gone up by 3X. As everyone says it's an infrastructure problem that is the tale as old as time. Tampa has had this problem for years and has never done anything to address the issue. As everyone knows you are always welcome to ignore a problem, but that does not make the problem go away. So, as they have ignored the problem it has just grown exponentially.  I also know this is a very common understanding for most people who are here in Tampa.  But those who are not from Tampa, will always comment that our traffic is not as bad as LA or Miami, Atlanta and so on.  And you know what? No, our traffic isn't as bad as those cities, it is worse. Because those cities have taken the time to build the infrastructure to handle the traffic. No one is saying anything new here, but that we never have really had a serious conversation about how to decrease traffic and to decrease traffic in a way where more than most of the people within the city see an actual benefit from the changes.   And that is the bigger discussion is how do we work to benefit a majority of the local residents when it comes to decreasing traffic without making it hard for those people who live in the surrounding communities of Brandon and Wesly Chapel to come in and enjoy what Tampa has to offer.