After nearly five years of construction, the new span of the Howard Frankland Bridge is open. In the early morning on Tuesday, March 25th, traffic traveling from Tampa to St. Petersburg shifted to the four southbound lanes on the new span.
More changes are ahead. This summer, the old southbound bridge will be converted into the northbound bridge carrying traffic from St. Pete to Tampa.
Several months after that, the other four lanes of the new eight-lane span, two tolled express lanes northbound and two southbound, will open in spring 2026, as the massive construction project nears completion. The shared-use bicycle and pedestrian path across the new span will also open next spring and the old northbound bridge, which dates back to 1960, will be taken down.
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FDOTThe new Howard Frankland Bridge span, shown here late in construction, opened to traffic on March 25th.A joint venture of Archer Western Construction and Traylor Brothers Inc. is leading the construction of the $865.3 million new bridge in a design-build project for the Florida Department of Transportation. By the numbers, FDOT says construction of the new 6.4-mile-long Howard Frankland Bridge used 127,000 cubic yards of concrete, 3,006 bridge piles, 1,727 beams, and close to 37 million pounds of rebar. Laid end to end, the piles would stretch on for 40 miles, the beams for 46 miles.
For more information, go to FDOT Howard Frankland
TECO Line Streetcar stays fare-free through September
The TECO Line Streetcar will stay fare-free through September while the Tampa City Council looks at future funding options.
At the March 13th Community Redevelopment Agency meeting, the City Council, in its role as the CRA board, voted to use $700,000 from the CRA to replace funding the streetcar lost when a Florida Department of Transportation grant expired. Filling that funding gap keeps the TECO LIne free to ride through the end of this fiscal year on September 30th.
“This is very very temporary,” Tampa City Council member Luis Viera says during the March 13th meeting. “All this does is push this issue off just a little bit more.”
Tampa City Council member Charlie Miranda was the lone no vote. At the meeting, Miranda says the federal government and the state’s government are both cutting funding for local governments and city government should prepare for tougher budget times ahead with moves like charging a fare of some kind for the streetcar.
“It’s gotta change,” he says. “Sooner or later, this government, like all governments, from what I see coming from Washington and Tallahassee, is not going to be able to throw money around.”
The $700,000 comes from the coffers of Tampa’s three community redevelopment area districts along the streetcar route, downtown, Channel District, and Ybor City. It’s additional funding on top of the $1.5 million from the CRA in the streetcar
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TECO LIne StreetcarAn additional $700,000 from Tampa's Community Redevelopment Agency keeps the TECO Line Streetcar fare-free through September 30th. system’s annual budget.
While Hillsborough Area Regional Transit operates the streetcar on a daily basis, city CRA money and the now-ended FDOT grants have funded the system and kept it fare-free since October 2018. Since going fare-free, ridership has increased by 339 percent and reached a record of more than 1.3 million passenger trips in fiscal year 2024.
Last November, HART held community meetings along the streetcar route and launched an online survey to gather public feedback on the possibility of reinstating a fare and get more details on how people use the streetcar. Not surprisingly, the more than 500 comments received showed overwhelming support for keeping the streetcar free. They expressed concerns reinstating a fare would negatively impact local businesses if fewer people were exploring downtown and Ybor City on the streetcar and concerns about increased traffic congestion downtown.
HART’s report on that public outreach also highlighted a change over the years in who rides the streetcar. Before 2018, tourists, people in town for a convention, and locals hanging out downtown on the weekend largely made up the ridership. Now, people are also using the streetcar to commute to work, expand their parking options, go to a restaurant, run errands, go to a hockey game, concert, or other event at Amalie Arena, or travel between downtown and Ybor.
For more information, go to TECO streetcar
Tampa Union Station: Amtrak’s busiest in state
Historic Tampa Union Station was the busiest Amtrak station in the state of Florida in 2023-2024, welcoming more than 156,600 passengers, a 21 percent increase over the previous year, nonprofit group Friends of Tampa Union Station says.
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Friends of Tampa Union StationHistoric Tampa Union Station saw a 21 percent jump in passengers during the 2023-24 budget year. For the fiscal year that ended September 30th, 2024, Tampa Union Station was the highest ridership stop for Amtrak’s New York to Miami Silver Star route, representing nearly 40 percent of the
route’s 388,122 passengers. The station’s 21 percent increase in passengers outpaced the overall 10 percent increase for the Silver Star route.
Right now, Amtrak has temporarily suspended the Silver Star due to a tunnel rehabilitation project in New York and combined the route with the Capitol Limited route to create the Floridian, which runs between Chicago and Miami via Washington, DC and Tampa, and gives a daily rail connection to the Midwest.
The spike in passenger numbers comes as the historic train station in downtown Tampa is about to undergo a multi-million dollar historic restoration and renovation project.
For more information, go to Friends of Tampa Union Station