Jeff Speck: a project to make Tampa a more walkable/bikeable city

Jeff Speck, if you recall, was in West Palm Beach last year and did a study for the city. He changed a lot of minds on traffic, making cities walkable and more safe for everyone: pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers. He is not a fan of FDOT's wide lanes and one-way streets. Had a chance to talk with him about our Lake Worth downtown and his suggestion was to make Lake and Lucerne Avenues two-way streets. Traffic would slow down, there would be increased business downtown (instead of cars zipping by at 35 to 40 mph and not seeing anything) and more pedestrians and bikes would be attracted to the area.

Now Speck is involved in a major project in Tampa. Here is an excerpt from Anastasia Dawson's article in The Tampa Tribune:

     Meridian Avenue, near the Channel District, has seven lanes of traffic, which should accommodate 35,000 cars a day. However, only about 5,800 actually use the street, [Jeff] Speck said. That extra space could be used to add wide bike paths and parallel parking, which serves as a “wall of steel” making sidewalks feel safer. [emphasis added]
     “I’ve reached the conclusion that number of lanes are the principal determinant of whether people will choose to walk in your city,” Speck said. “You need to give pedestrians the feeling they have a fighting chance against being run down by an automobile.”
     Despite the big lanes, Tampa was designed with smaller blocks than the average city, which makes it “exceptionally poised” to become safe and walkable and provides “good bones” for diverse blocks of housing, offices, churches and retail, Speck said.
     The city is already working to re-stripe many one-way streets into two-way streets, which will cause drivers to slow down and roads to become safer for everyone, Speck said. Another prudent move would be to make some streets’ width narrower, like the neighborhoods around Hyde Park, so cars have to slow to pass each other.

One of the justifications for one-way streets is they are safer: that is a myth. Slowly more and more people are coming to that realization.