While the big news right now is the quasi-signing of reliever Fernando Rodney by the Rays -- hold off on your judgement until we see the final terms of the deal -- I've got something a little bit different to share this morning: this article from the Atlantic Cities page on the development of "Megapolitan" cities. Two authors recently wrote a book "Megapolitan America", in which they discuss the future development of key urban areas across America. They see more metropolitan areas going the way of the Dallas-Fort Worth area and merging into one giant mega-metropolitan area, where large regions of the country are connected via transportation, commerce, planning, etc.
If you go to the article, you can see a graphic that highlights the 23 areas of the country the authors view as likely to evolve into megapolitan areas over the next 20-30 years. Chief among them is Central Florida:
Lang says that one of his megapolitan regions, Central Florida, is one of those prime candidates. Tampa and Orlando have a high degree of commuting integration, which would have been a good argument for high speed rail, but Governor Rick Scott returned the $2.4 billion the federal government had awarded the state for such a project. Lang argues that was a missed opportunity, not just for the transportation link, but for the economic link it would have helped solidify between the two cities - one with an active port, the other with an active airport.
"The whole region of Central Florida is a point of integration into the global economy," Lang says. "Because you could live across that region, if you had more effective transportation across it would have made it easier. Together those two markets could have gone from modest- to good-sized cities to a Dallas structure in terms of size and scale."
He says it was business interests pushing for the rail link, not transit advocates. "They were trying to link the two regions to help Orlando diversify its economy, to provide resilience in downturns."
There are some exciting times ahead for the Tampa Bay area, which is one of the reasons I shake my head whenever someone in the media suggests relocating the franchise. It just ain't happening. Florida has the potential to be a massive market one day, and the area is only improving in its infrastructure and connectedness. It's taking time to get there, probably because Florida's economy is still flummoxed with mortgage issues.
But as Josh Frank pointed out to me yesterday, Pinellas county will have a ballot measure next year to hopefully approve a local light-rail line. And the infrastructure for the high-speed rail line is ready to get off the ground as soon as Scott gets out of office. And Tampa has set up an advisory panel to help with their urban planning and development, and they seem to want to get a light-rail line of their own going. The area is about this close to breaking out and beginning a new wave of development and growth; it just may be a few years before that happens.
Anyway, rant over. The Rays have a bright future ahead of them, if only we can have some patience.
Other links? Yeah, there's a lot of them today.
0 recs | 34 comments
Having never been to your glorious country
What are the transport links like? Countrywide and Tampa specific?
I hear a lot about the issue of getting to the trop so guessing there isnt a lot?
OneTonneBaby - January 4, 2012
Awful
You can pay $10 to drive to a lot and take a bus from there to Tropicana, but public transportation schedules are not the easiest things to use to get to a Rays game. I can only imagine what it would entail for someone on the other side of the water to make it over.
Jason Collette - January 4, 2012
The high speed rail was stupid
Once you got off the rail in either city, where would you have gone? You can’t walk anywhere in Tampa or Orlando and public transportation is terrible. If there was even a plan in place to develop that infrastructure than the high speed rail would have made sense. As it was, it stands as one of the only Rick Scott decisions I’ve ever agreed with.
Barnacles - January 4, 2012
Downtown Orlando is very walkable
Residential units in the area are exploding and people most likely to use a high speed rail, working professional yuppies downtown, all live within 0-3 miles of where the downtown station was proposed. Talk to anyone that isn’t making the drive over to the Tampa area for concerts & sporting events & I-4 is the #1 reason for it.
Jason Collette - January 4, 2012
I live in downtown Orlando
The residential units downtown are not ‘exploding’. They cratered with the rest of the real estate industry. Yes, the small downtown area is very walkable and there is a very nice bus system around here but honestly, other than Magic games there isn’t a whole lot going on downtown.
Barnacles - January 4, 2012
Thornton Park?
That area has seen a huge influx of development there and the completion of the arts center is only going to add another draw to downtown. Pretty much everything along the shores of Lake Eola. 57 West was a debacle, but last I heard, they were making do with the work and finding ways to fill the space.
Add in the massive expansion of the ORMC medical complex and you get people interested in coming this way for work & play while unclogging I-4.
Jason Collette - January 4, 2012
The arts center was already downtown
They just moved it to a better location and are building a better venue. There isn’t and hasn’t been any new development here for the past three or four years (excepting the arts center and one smaller commercial building on South St) – it was so overdeveloped during the boom.
The high speed rail wasn’t even going to stop at Disney/Universal, which are the two credible draws to Orlando.
Barnacles - January 4, 2012
SunRail is going to have a few stops down there
I’m going to guess Disney will set up buses from there as they do the airport to bring people in.
Jason Collette - January 4, 2012
There seem to be plenty of plans in place to expand the local public transportation options.
This isn’t an overnight thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire area was much more connected in 5-10 years.
Steve Slowinski - January 4, 2012
It's a chicken before the egg issue
It’s not like this a permanently lost opportunity. If the cities continue to grow and expand their infrastructure, it can be revisited. But planning for it to open in the next year or two would have only resulted in a lot of empty trains being run back and forth on taxpayer funding.
Barnacles - January 4, 2012
I'm not as disappointed as I used to be that it didn't get done at first.
It sounds like the project is ready to get off the ground and get done at the drop of a hat (comparatively speaking), so it’ll get there eventually…it’s just a matter of when. And considering the recent talks of light rail in Tampa and St. Pete, there could be a good local infrastructure up sooner rather than later.
Steve Slowinski - January 4, 2012
it's funny
taking a look at the debacle the California High Speed Rail Project has become. The same promises of cost control were in place, the rail line are ready (hell, they are ready to begin the first 130 mile stretch now) but the project nearly tripled in cost. Now it’s hard to find a politician who argues that the project as is should move forward.
I want a high speed natural gas bus line to be built connecting Orlando and Tampa. Right on the high speed rail land. The buses, without traffic can average around the same speed as a high speed rail with much lower operating and maintenance costs. The bus ridership can be examined on a year to year basis, the stops along the way can be built up, and the number of buses running can be expanded as ridership expands.
There is no reason to go “all in” on a high speed rail project as the only option. There are many others that should be examined.
MrNegative1 - January 4, 2012
The companies involved offered to pickup any cost overruns
So that wasn’t an issue. It was a purely political move. It made no sense in anyway whatsoever to reject that money.
Sveet - January 4, 2012
Yup I'm sure another 2.4 Billion dollars will be offered up for it sometime soon
Sveet - January 4, 2012
It's pretty hard to find the people willing to admit they voted for Rick Scott these days
Whole lotta knee jerking going on, still. Hell, a guy who has a byproduct of anal sex named after him nearly won the Iowa caucus yesterday.
Brickhaus - January 4, 2012
I don't know what people think is so weird about Santorum.
My parents brought home my dead grandma to hang out with the family for a week after she passed.
Hatfield - January 4, 2012 via mobile
My problem with the choo-choo's is that they will almost certainly pick me up and drop me off in an undesirable area where I will want to neither walk or leave my car.
Hatfield - January 4, 2012
related....they did plan a stop in lakeland
Sveet - January 4, 2012
People would have flocked to the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Florida Southern Campus.
Barnacles - January 4, 2012
Now that is somewhere I would leave my car.
Unfortunately I’m certain the stop would be made in sunny Kathleen or Wabash to ‘revitalize’ the area (aka vandalize my car).
Hatfield - January 4, 2012 via mobile
Lack of top notch educational institutions is a bigger problem than the mortgage issues
What are the largest companies to originate in Central Florida? Publix is huge, sure, and Raymond James is building a solid reputation, but after that you have what, Outback and Hooters? Maybe Jabil and Tech Data? The three largest companies headquartered in the Tampa area (a steel company, a coal company and an energy systems manufacturer) have almost no employees in the Tampa Bay area because we don’t have the natural resources or infrastructure necessary to employ people for them.
http://www2.tbo.com/news/central-tampa/2009/mar/09/tampa-bay-areas-10-biggest-companies-ar-111953/
With strong leadership and a willingness to help fund things publicly, you can get companies to relocate to Central Florida, but Tampa really has neither, and there are other places where overhead is just as low that are a lot more willing to pay (which is why so many manufacturing jobs these days are located in Tennessee and Alabama).
If you can’t get companies to move, then you need to have someone starting them here. And if you look at where the biggest post-industrial companies have started, they tend to be based in areas around high level academic institutions, in part because that’s where most of the ideas come from, and in part because it means there’s easy access to an intelligent, hard-working employee base. It’s not coincidence that most of these companies have been based around Silicon Valley, Seattle, Northern Virginia, Dallas/Austin, Chicago, New York and Boston. While USF is a much better school than even when I went there (when I worked in admissions about 13 years ago, the median GPA for admitted students was a little under 2.8, while it’s now around 3.6), it’s not strong in the areas that would produce new commerce. And while areas can expand in terms of population, they don’t become much more attractive, other than sheer available manpower, without having something pull up near the top of the pyramid to increase the standard of living. Sure, Central Florida may get more populous (although the population has actually stagnated relatively over the last 15 years), but without some businesses that bring significant outside revenue to the area, it will just end up like Houston or Phoenix.
Brickhaus - January 4, 2012
That GPA disparity can be deceiving though
With AP and dual enrollment college courses being weighted at 4.5 or 5.0 on a 4.0 GPA scale.
I graduated with a 4.25 GPA and was only 16th in my class.
13 years ago, 4.0 meant 4.0.
Hatfield - January 4, 2012 via mobile
#humblebrag
rglass44 - January 4, 2012
A 4.25 at a polk county school is equivilant to a 2.6 at a school in a real school district like suffolk county
#bestcity #bestcounty #beststate
Sveet - January 4, 2012
"equivilant"
Hatfield - January 4, 2012 via mobile
If only I was schooled in boston
Sveet - January 4, 2012
LOL
I love how the author of this post has all these grand ideas for what kind of transportation this area needs and doesn’t even live here. I didn’t click that stupid link, but something tells me the authors of that article don’t live here either.
Anyone who thinks a high-speed rail line between Tampa and Orlando will improve on anything other than the very margins is either dreaming or not very bright. NEWS FLASH: you can already ride a train from Tampa to Orlando and back. It’s called Amtrak, it costs $19 each way, and it’s been around forever. The only problem: nobody uses it, because it sucks. Maybe a few more people would use a new ‘high-speed’ train (scare quotes because the proposed trains won’t even go faster than your car does on I-4 right now) becaue it will suck slightly less, but overall would be a huge waste.
Anyway, rant over.
For further reading, here’s a post from the L.A. Times today on how their wonderful high-speed rail project continues to fall on its face:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/01/state-bonds.html
homeboogie - January 4, 2012
I'm not saying the execution is being done well
But the bullet train between Tokyo and Osaka, say, has been a magnificent success. It’s not a given that it would be a huge waste, but if those are the parameters, then I can see the issues. It also really hurts that neither Tampa nor Orlando has good public transportation generally – you need the car to get around.
Brickhaus - January 4, 2012
Tokyo has like six or seven times the population of Tampa/St. Pete!
Barnacles - January 4, 2012
Actually, it's only $11 each way if you schedule it in advance
Issue is schedule because it only runs 2x a day.
Jason Collette - January 4, 2012
Crisp tells A's beat writer it came down to A's & Rays but he wanted to stay close to his family
Jason Collette - January 4, 2012
That's pretty suprising
I don’t really see the fit unless we trade Upton. But how much better is he than Sam Fuld, really?
Barnacles - January 4, 2012
Upton or Crisp?
Ryan Gilliss - January 4, 2012
Crisp.
Barnacles - January 4, 2012
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