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Hillsborough Area Regional Transit plans to build a park-and-ride station at Falkenburg Road to connect Brandon commuters to downtown Tampa and MacDill Air Force Base.
The agency says it's negotiating to purchase property just east of Falkenburg and south of the Lee Roy Selmon Expressway to accommodate 200 to 250 cars. The 25LX and 27LX buses would stop there and then take the expressway into downtown or toward MacDill. Two more routes, the 22X and 24X, as well as some local buses, might make stops there as well.
HART says it's finalizing route configurations and fine-tuning the facility's overall design. It would be unlike other HART park-and-ride stops, the agency said. In addition to covered waiting areas with benches, the agency wants to include restrooms and an indoor snack bar or some other leased space. Now, many of the stops are little more than a bench at a shopping center parking lot.
"Potentially we're looking at a building with a small shopping area," said Les Weakland, a HART project manager. "People could drop off their dry cleaning, or maybe we could have a small coffee shop."
"Whatever we can do to help those riders out there, that's what we're trying to do," he said.
Officials hope to present a land purchase proposal to the agency's board of directors in January and open the station by March 2013.
The plan comes amid steady growth in HART's local and express routes, mirroring trends nationally. Ridership on express routes from Brandon, Dover, FishHawk and other points east of Interstate 75 increased by double-digit percentages this past year, the agency's records show.
For the full article, visit the St. Petersburg Times.
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