People are Everywhere

As Alyson and I jumped on the highway to drive south to watch football I noticed a huge amount of cars on the road for 11am on a Saturday. Way more than I probably felt were on the road a decade prior so I felt like Tampa has just been growing fast with people.

However, I found a Redfin article that said Tampa in 2024 was the metro city with the largest amount of net migration decrease from the previous year. It basically said that in 2023 Tampa gained 35k people, but in 2024 only gained 10k people which is just a smaller growth from the previous year. This was in stark comparison to the other Florida cities that had no gain and only extreme lost with numbers like -67k (Miami) or -26k (Fort Lauderdale) of folks moving away.

Now reading about how Americans move around year after year is quite a fun topic, because seeing New York lose 160k people in a year makes me wonder where they all went. However, this topic is just about the amount of people in Tampa.

Much like other cities we await hectic construction traffic awaiting a solution to some congestion. Once completed we realize the increased capacity is just filled with more demand and the newly added lane did not have as much as a fix we hoped. We complain there isn't enough parking, but then as we destroy marshland to slap down concrete lots we wonder why things flood more often than in the past.

To avoid the hectic rush of finding a parking spot one time Alyson and I decided to take the trolley into downtown Tampa from Ybor. We could enjoy a day out in the city and drink a bit without worrying about a car.

To our surprise the tram journey ended really early with the staff member saying there was an incident on the track and the journey was ending 6 stops too early. As we get off the trolley and walked past the other stopped trolleys I could finally see it - a car was on the tracks.

My mind was blown so I grabbed my phone and snapped a photo for the internet karma, but I'm flabbergasted. Like what happened? We get a chance to avoid driving and use public transportation and then a car ruins it for all of us. I can't fathom a reason of how this car ended up midway down a train track in the middle of a low traffic morning. It's incredibly funny at the same time that its annoying which led to us having to walk way longer in the sun.

If it isn't the weekend and I'm sitting at the office - chances are if I leave anywhere between 4-6pm this is the light I'll spend a lot of time at.

For someone waiting to turn onto the busy Busch Blvd I'm on a side street light that during rush hour barely gets a chance to cross the street. With my dash cam footage above this is a light that takes 2min & 30 seconds at least before I get the green light. There are so many cars on the road that enter the intersection without a clear path forward that most days the light turns green and I'm in a pickle because of a blocked intersection.

I can proceed into a blocked intersection blocking more cars so when the congestion clears I can get on the road or stay still with an occasional horn blaring to avoid blocking traffic. The clip above is a common situation that shows not many cars running a red light, but clogging the intersection briefly and cutting seconds out of our very short cycle light. With probably 10-20 cars in line with me - that delay is making some cars behind me very angry when they miss the light.

If I head to work early - cars everywhere. If I head to trivia after work and head home late at 9pm - cars everywhere. If a Sunday morning creeps past 9am - cars everywhere. Sometimes I just don't understand where everyone is going. Sure I'm just another driver myself, but at 7:50am when I'm rolling into a park for a run and I'm 40 cars deep at a stoplight I'm just curious what everyone else is doing.

With a trip to the rural parts of Virginia next week maybe I'll get to experience a break from the nonstop people & traffic of Tampa for the lesser busy Virginia.