Council members took an initial step Tuesday evening to make Tampa’s most popular bus route free to ride for a year, a move championed by advocates as a way to boost ridership, economic development and mobility in the car-dependent city.
They voted 4-3 to reallocate $1.5 million of the proposed budget for the upcoming year to launch the fare-free pilot and increase the frequency of service between downtown and the University of South Florida. The money was initially earmarked for electric vehicle chargers.
“We’ve all heard the citizens. They want transportation. This is the way to do it,” said Councilmember Lynn Hurtak, who led the push for changes to Route 1, which lumbers along an often traffic-choked Florida Avenue and currently carries over 3,000 riders a day.
For the program to become a reality, the money must be voted on again in the budget passed later this month. The board of the Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority, which operates the buses, has yet to have a formal discussion on the funding proposal.
Mayor Jane Castor issued a lukewarm response.
“A fare-free pilot program is a good idea,” she said in a statement to the Tampa Bay Times via a spokesperson. “However, given our scarce resources and extensive transportation needs, a more detailed and appropriately vetted plan is needed prior to reassigning $1.5 million to an experiment.”
Across the bay, a fare-free pilot for the SunRunner, a rapid bus line connecting downtown St. Petersburg with St. Pete beach, was cut short after beach residents’ complaints that the shuttle was drawing homeless people to their shores. Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri took up beach residents’ cause, saying his agency was spending thousands of dollars to respond to all the complaints.
Throughout the region, limited transportation investment has not kept up with basic maintenance, let alone delivered transit such as light rail found in other similarly sized metro areas. Castor often begrudgingly jokes that mass transit in Tampa means more than two people in an SUV.
“Until the city steps up to fund better bus service, we are going to perpetually be in the same situation,” Justin Willits, director of planning and scheduling at the county transit agency, told Tampa City Council members Tuesday.
In Sun Belt cities, transit struggles to compete with the car. Nationwide, buses started to lose ground decades ago as Americans bought cars, suburbanized and spread out. In Hillsborough County, luring commuters onto the bus when they can otherwise drive has been nearly impossible because it often means opting into delays and bare-bones routes.
During Tuesday’s meeting, resident after resident urged the council to green-light the transportation investment.
Bobby Creighton didn’t think much about transit as a kid growing up in car-centric Hillsborough County. His time living out of state and job now working with residents unable to drive due to disabilities, he said, helped him understand buses as a lifeline.
“Public transportation is mobility. It’s economic mobility, it’s social mobility,” said Creighton, a Tampa-based speech pathologist. “And it’s freedom for people that really need it.”
More than 32,000 people live within a quarter mile of Route 1. Roughly one in five of those households don’t have a car. Under the pilot proposal, frequency would increase from roughly 20 minutes to every 15 on weekdays, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Annual ridership is projected to jump by about 300,000 to 1.4 million.
Tampa residents spend a higher proportion of their income on housing and transportation than people who live in peer cities Pittsburgh, Richmond, Austin, Charlotte and Orlando, according to the citywide master mobility plan published in 2022. A higher share of Tampa residents drive to work alone compared to those other cities, except for Orlando.
From Tucson to Raleigh, Olympia to Boston, cities nationwide are experimenting with dropping fares on their transit systems.
Beyond its popularity, Willits said Route 1 was a logical option for Tampa to try fare-free service because it connects with the city’s streetcar, which has evolved from an oft-disparaged tourist attraction into a reliable commuter route with record-breaking ridership. The streetcar has been free since 2018.
Along with Hurtak, council members Guido Maniscalco, Alan Clendenin and Luis Viera supported the proposal.
“It moves us forward,” said Viera, chairperson of the board overseeing the transit agency.
Councilmember Gwen Henderson, another board member, does not support the initiative.
“It wouldn’t be fair to other areas in Tampa that could use financial support,” she said. “If we’re going to spend $1.5 million, we should give it to people who actually really need it.”
While agreeing there’s a need for expanded public transit, councilmember Bill Carlson said funding the program was unsustainable and not the city’s responsibility.
“We’re creating an expectation that we can’t fill in the future,” he said. “My commitment is to fix this problem, but I want to do it systematically. I’m not going to put a Band-Aid on it.”
Hurtak expressed disappointment with her colleagues’ reluctance with getting on board.
“If we can’t do something to try to help people then why are we here?” she said as the meeting stretched into the night. “We cannot make perfect the enemy of the good. We owe it to the public to try.”
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