TAMPA BAY, Fla. — For regional travelers and local business commuters alike, navigating South Tampa hasn’t always been a breeze—especially during early morning rush hour.
But the Selmon Extension’s toll lane across Gandy Boulevard is helping to alleviate some of the frustration a lot of drivers feel.
Before the 1.9-mile Selmon Extension opened in 2021, there was a huge problem across the Tampa Bay area. Regional drivers struggled to travel even local distances efficiently without major incidents.
"Prior to building that west extension over Gandy Boulevard, what we found [...] was a tremendous amount of traffic," Greg Slater, CEO Tampa Hillsborough Expressway Authority team, said. "We saw delays in every intersection between Westshore and Dale Mabry. We saw crashes up and down that corridor and just people that were having trouble getting in and out of the businesses and traveling."
So in 2018, the Tampa Hillsborough Expressway Authority team—or THEA—proposed a project: to build an upper deck expressway extension to separate through traffic from local traffic. And according to new data, you could say it’s going even better than expected.
"What we’re finding is that about 50% of the traffic in that corridor has been taken off of Gandy Boulevard below and is now on that upper deck," said Slater, who joined THEA in 2022. "In fact, we’re already seeing traffic levels that we projected in 2030. So this was all prior to some of the more recent growth that we’re seeing in the region."
From a 22% decrease in crashes along Gandy between 2018 and 2022 to a significant reduction in travel times, all of the expressway authority's work is proving to create safer conditions along one of Tampa Bay’s busiest routes.
Plus, there's still more to come.
"We’ve got another project and we’re just in the process of reconstructing the south Selmon, so about the Hillsborough River to the west extension," Slater said. "We’ve even got a project where we’re gonna redevelop some of the undersides like you see here and create a dog park and some pickleball courts over on Bay to Bay."
If you want to keep your finger on the pulse of Tampa Bay area traffic, head to our traffic section to see more of these data findings and stay up to speed with how we’re continually driving Tampa Bay forward.
