A Brief Look at Some Major Roads Northwest of Tampa

As any commuter in Hillsborough County, Florida knows, the roads in the northwestern part of the county are not only clogged, they are absolutely everywhere. The decreasing availability of land, high property taxes and insurance premiums, and builder interest in the southeastern part of the county may have all helped to signal the end of the population explosion in the northwestern part of the county. However, what now remains is a number of multi-lane roads, countless subdivisions, and strips malls-a-plenty. One has to ask, has northwest Hillsborough County always been like this? The short answer is no.

While the county probably had a need for these roads years before they were actually built or widened, one needs to go back only about twenty years to return to a time when Waters Avenue was only two lanes wide, Gunn Highway was a road that led to the country, Fletcher and Bearss Avenues were non-existent in some parts, Linebaugh Avenue was a two-lane drag, Pinecrest Manor was yet to be built, and even Dale Mabry Highway was not nearly as wide as it is today. This brief overview of some major northwest Hillsborough County roads and the changes they saw over the past couple decades illustrates some of the basic changes these roads has seen.

As many longtime residents can tell you, northwest Hillsborough County, though having already experienced the beginnings of growth over the past decade or two earlier, saw a dramatic increase in road surface area during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the county not only widened and opened a number of major roads in the area, but also opened the Veterans Expressway, a toll road link that now connects counties north of Hillsborough to Tampa International Airport, State Road 60, and Interstate-275. As anybody who drove in the area at the time can tell you, northwest Hillsborough County was a land of hot asphalt fumes and mazes of barricades and orange cones during the late 1980s and early 1990s.