Recent Streetsblog USA posts about Florida

Massive Highway Expansion Threatens to Destroy Tampa Neighborhoods

By Angie Schmitt | Jun 21, 2016 | 10 Comments

Most people still think of Tampa as a sprawling, car-centric town, but that is starting to change. In 2014, Smart Growth America [PDF] found that Tampa is shifting toward a more walkable development pattern. The city is starting to build out a bicycle network, and its Riverwalk project is bringing people out to stroll downtown. Tampa’s recent progress could be overwhelmed, however, […]

Huh? After Bailing Out Toll Road, Florida Wants to Expand It

By Angie Schmitt | Feb 18, 2016 | No Comments

By any reasonable measure, the Suncoast Parkway in the Tampa Bay Area has been a complete failure. When it was first proposed, in 1992, consultants predicted the $507 million, 42-mile toll road from Hillsborough to Hernando County would fill up with cars — thanks to the sprawl everyone was sure would follow it. Consultants originally forecast $150 million in […]

Highway Boondoggles: Tampa Bay Express Lanes

By Jeff Inglis and John Olivieri | Jan 20, 2016 | 1 Comment

In a new report, Highway Boondoggles 2 (the original came out in 2014), U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group teamed up to profile the most wasteful highway projects that state DOTs are building. Streetsblog will be serializing the case studies in the report. Yesterday, we looked at Connecticut’s $11.5 billion I-95 widening. Today, we focus on a proposed $3.3 billion […]

What Happened When a Newspaper Became an Advocate for Bicyclists

By Angie Schmitt | Jan 6, 2016 | 6 Comments

In too many cities, newspaper coverage of bicycling has stoked some of the darker aspects of human nature. Opinion pieces about bike lanes tend to cater to the reactionary opposition, goading the trolls of the comments section, where casual death threats are standard fare. But a newspaper in South Florida has taken a very different approach over […]

Meet the Man on a Mission to Make Florida Walkable and Bikeable

By Angie Schmitt | Mar 30, 2015 | 8 Comments

Billy Hattaway just might have the most challenging job in any American transportation agency. As the Florida Department of Transportation’s lead official on bicycle and pedestrian safety, he’s charged with making Florida — consistently rated among the deadliest states for walking and biking — safe for people to get around under their own power. Since FDOT hired him […]

The Koch Brothers’ War on Transit

By Angie Schmitt | Sep 25, 2014 | 52 Comments

Transit advocates around the country were transfixed by a story in Tennessee this April, when the state chapter of Americans for Prosperity made a bid to pre-emptively kill Nashville bus rapid transit. It was an especially brazen attempt by Charles and David Koch’s political network to strong-arm local transportation policy makers. But it was far from […]

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