LAND O’LAKES — Breaking: Traffic in Pasco County is dreadful.
But at the latest North Tampa Bay Chamber of Commerce economic development briefing, county traffic planners assured the dozen or so business leaders in attendance that plans for road improvements were underway, and they were still looking for public input.
The Pasco County MPO, which is the transportation planning entity for all of Pasco, is currently working on updating the countywide transportation plan, with part of the process soliciting public participation.
“The technical name is long-range transportation plan,” said Scott Ferry, principal transportation planner with Pasco County. “But I really don’t like to emphasize long range, because people’s eyes kind of glaze over, but what the plan is doing is the plan is seeking to identify both current transportation needs … and anticipated needs.”
The long-range transportation plan is known as Innovate Pasco 2050, and had more than 1,100 people participate in December and January via meetings, workshops and an online survey atInnovatePasco.com.
There were 1,871 comments from all over the county.
Asked to give one word that describes Pasco County transportation today, a website word cloud shows participants used choices like lousy, problematic, crowded, unpredictable and haphazard.
Ferry was joined by Jonathan Whitehurst and Joe Crozier of Kimley-Horn, a transportation planning consulting firm.
Those who participated in previous meetings and surveys dropped pins on a map on the Innovate Pasco 2050 website pointing out hot spots when it comes to traffic congestion, and focused on New Port Richey, the State Road 54/U.S. 41 intersection in Land O’Lakes, the eastern ends of S.R. 54 and S.R. 56 in Zephyrhills and U.S. 301 in Zephyrhills, particularly around that road’s intersection with S.R. 56.
Other slightly less hot spots in the Wesley Chapel area included the S.R. 52 and S.R. 54 intersections with I-75.
The Innovate Pasco 2025 plan is multimodal and will also examine other modes of travel like walking, biking, public transportation and others.
But while it was unanimous at the chamber meeting that Wesley Chapel (and most of Pasco County) is not all that friendly to bicyclists, the focus of the meeting was on transportation barriers facing economic development, and some of the changes those in attendance would like to see.
The group zeroed in a few issues.
One local business leader, Jamie Hess, said the county could do a better job of anticipating growth.
He said the length of time it takes to complete projects was staggering.
“S.R. 54 and Wesley Chapel (widening) is a prime example,” he said. “It took literally six years to finish the project. By the time they finish the project, they already needed two more lanes. I would say delay of construction (is a problem). I’ve never seen anything like it here.”
Others thought the intersection light timings may be contributing to bottlenecks and delays, moreso than the lack of lanes. While fixing that is not the charge of Innovation Pasco 2050, it will be working with county engineers to help identify those intersections.
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Explore all your optionsEveryone answered in unison when asked about which improvement the county has made that was most successful: The S.R. 56/I-75 interchange, or the diverging diamond.
The MPO, which is comprised of a nine-member governing board that includes all five members of the County Commission and four municipal representatives, is hoping to endorse proactive improvements that can help with future roadway needs.
That’s a tough task, said Whitehurst, because that means anticipating future growth and where it will happen.
“We’re identifying the current, and more importantly, the anticipated transportation needs for the county over the next 20 years,” he said. “We’re trying to find that baseline condition of where things are now so that we can start to predict where things are going to be in the future.”
Whitehurst said the rapid growth of Pasco County, most notably in Dade City, Wesley Chapel and the Land O’ Lakes corridor, makes that a tricky endeavor.
Covid, and the migration of new residents with different working conditions, has also bumped up the level of difficulty in putting together a plan, which they hope to have finished by June.
“So, we’ve got quite a bit of work to do between now and next month,” he said.
The plan wouldn’t be adopted by the MPO until later this year. Once adopted, it serves as a blueprint for county transportation planning for the next five years.
Whitehurst said the planners are currently in the “needs” phase, and identifying problem areas. Those needs will then be prioritized, to stretch the money they would likely have available to complete them.
“It’s a big list of projects, and we’ve got a small amount of money,” he said.
The roadway projects are built into a spreadsheet which will rank their importance, and, “kind of concurrent with that, we’re also looking at how much money we have to spend on transportation projects,” Whitehurst added. “And so, we take that prioritized list and put it against the funding, and we just see how far down the list we can make it.”
Crozier said that prioritizing is harder than it used to be, thanks to new, unfamiliar patterns of growth.
“A lot of the growth models, especially after Covid, are just not accurate anymore,” he said. “This is the first cycle a lot of the different growth patterns have started happening.”
Identifying where the growth will be is a key to any transportation plan, as the two are closely aligned when it comes to economic development.
And keeping the residents driving on those roads and frequenting many of those businesses is also important, which is why Whitehurst said the public outreach and participation portion of the upcoming plan is so crucial.
“It needs to be a community driven plan,” Whitehurst said. “Sometimes when you say we’re doing a long-range transportation plan to the year 2050, people don’t really get excited about that. You tell them you’re going to put a road through their neighborhood, and they’re like, ‘I will come to that meeting.’ So, we’re trying to get folks kind of excited and engaged in this. Maybe some of us won’t see all of those impacts or benefits in the future. But certainly, for the next generation.”
For more information or to participate in or review the results of the Innovate Pasco 2050 efforts so far, visitInnovatePasco.com
John C. Cotey is the managing editor of the Tampa Beacon. He can be reached atjcotey@tampabeacon.com
